I also wrote you a blog post a year ago. What I said there was true a year ago and it is equally true now. Specifically, I want to share this part:

I hope you choose MIT, obviously. This place is amazing. If you got in, it’s because you can handle it, and because you’re the kind of person who might love it. Life moves fast here: there are many more opportunities—for fun, for work, or both—than you have time for, even if you don’t sleep. But whether you choose MIT or not, own your decision, because when the path you choose gets difficult, it will be very helpful to rekindle the assurance and sense of purpose that drove you to follow it. Do it because you know you want to do it, not because of money or rankings or because other people say you should.

Feel free to ask me any questions you have about MIT in the comments or by email. No matter what you choose, from the bottom of my heart: good luck!

Black Hole kitchen

Bonfire kitchen and lounge

Pecker kitchen

Clam lounge

BMF kitchen

BMF lounge

Destiny kitchen

Foo lounge

One of the strangest, most opportune gifts I've gotten was a small plastic aquarium, from one of my best friends, on my sixth birthday. Misha had scrawled his name on the card, but you could tell it was one of those disappointing educational gifts that was actually picked out by the parents.

I found it almost a year later in my closet, full of beads and wrapped in a pink feather boa. In a bout of the haphazard enthusiasm characteristic of that age, I dumped the beads on the floor and filled the aquarium with tap water and a bag of bright blue aquarium sand I found under the sink. That evening my parents bought me two aquatic frogs (both male).

The bulk of my childhood was defined by those frogs. I spent hours every week watching them eat and swim in the mornings before my parents woke up. After my little brother was born we curled up next to their aquarium and watched them together, and when they died seven years later I had trouble falling asleep without their singing.

The Axolotl

Since then I've branched out, extending my love for frogs to amphibians in general. My favorite amphibian today is the axolotl, because it eschews the very first characteristic we're taught to associate with the class. Most amphibians are born in the water, metamorphose into their adult forms, and crawl out onto the land, not to return to their home ponds, streams, or lakes until they're ready to lay their own eggs. The axolotl, on the other hand, never leaves its aquatic birthplace. In fact, it forgoes metamorphosis altogether, retaining its larval characteristics even as it reaches sexual maturity. Consequently the axolotl possesses for life not only its characteristic feathery external gills, but also unique regenerative powers.

In humans and most other species, cells are trapped in their final forms after they differentiate. But because the axolotl does not metamorphose, its cells are capable of reverting to a state similar to stem cells, prefatory cells that can develop into anything. Rather than plaster wounds with scar tissue like we do, the axolotl rebuilds injured tissue. The result is like new.

Amazingly, these abilities extend well beyond the level of tissues: the axolotl is capable of regenerating entire limbs, even when they include parts of the spinal cord and the neurons inside it, and even parts of the brain. Since the 1960s, the axolotl has been studied in hopes of understanding its regenerative powers and applying them to other organisms—perhaps even humans. The axolotl is, in essence, the closest thing in nature to a fountain of youth.

Unfortunately, the days of the axolotl and any secrets it hides are numbered. Of the two Mexico City lakes the wild axolotl once persisted in, one, Lake Chalco, has been drained to subdue flooding, destroying the axolotls and other animals within it. The other, Lake Xochimilco, has been reduced to a heavily polluted system of canals and small lakes fed by water treatment plants. Axolotls exist in six isolated areas of the former Lake Xochimilco, mostly clumped around the few remaining natural springs.

When the Aztecs began building Mexico City, Lakes Chalco and Xochimilco were a system of five large groundwater-fed lakes. The axolotl was prevalent in Aztec culture, ubiquitous in food, in cultural ceremonies, and in medicine.

Today, Mexico is home to 375 identified amphibian species, making it the country with the fifth greatest amphibian diversity. At the same time, Mexico City is home to 18 million people, making it the third largest metropolitan area in the world. In the past two decades, the wild population of the axolotl has fallen sixtyfold. Today there are estimated to be between 700 and 1,200 axolotls in the wild.

The primary threat to axolotls is habitat loss and the degradation of what little habitat remains. Pollution from Mexico City corrupts water quality, and UV-B radiation, caused by the degradation of the ozone layer, weakens young axolotls, making them more susceptible to predators and to disease. In addition, at least ten species of nonnative fish have been introduced into Lake Xochimilco. These invasive species have substantial niche overlap with the axolotls to compete with them for food and to eat their eggs and young. Human exploitation for food and medicine, meanwhile, is no longer a concern, as axolotls are scarce enough to be a rare catch for fishermen.

The Amphibian

The threat of imminent extinction looms over other amphibian species as well. Three summers ago, biologists from the University of the Andes in Colombia used a combination of genetics and almost a decade of field work to discover 11 new amphibian species in Panama, only to find that five were extinct by the time they were identified. In the past decade, 40% of amphibian species at the El Cope national park in Panama have disappeared.

At 300 million years old, amphibians are the oldest four-legged vertebrates on Earth. Since the 1970s, however, they have been in decline. Today, according to the International Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, an inventory of all known species' conservation statuses, 2.1% of known amphibian species are extinct, 32.5% are threatened with extinction, and 43% are declining.

Threats to amphibians mirror those to the axolotl. Like the axolotl, other amphibians also suffer from habitat loss, pollution, exploitation by humans, and competition from invasive species. In addition, over 2800 amphibian species are threatened by the chytrid fungus, a deadly pathogen that kills up to 80% of amphibians within a year of being introduced and is spreading at a rate of 28 to 100 kilometers a year.

Even the fungus can be traced to human influence. Many researchers believe that a warmer climate favors the propagation of chytrid, and that the current outbreaks are due to warmer temperatures, though this is controversial. Less debated is that recent changes in amphibian habitat, from climate change to urbanization, cause enough stress to compromise the amphibian immune system, making it more vulnerable to chytrid. Worse, disease transmission increases with diversity loss. As amphibian diversity vanishes, susceptibility to chytrid will only increase.

One trait that makes amphibians particularly valuable to us is their skin. Amphibians depend on their skin for everything from breathing to hydration to self-defense. Their thin, permeable skin gives them an especially intimate connection with the world around them, which includes the water they are born in, the land they live on, and the air they breathe. Because amphibians are especially sensitive to toxins and other harmful changes in the environment, they are often considered indicators of their habitat's health. When trouble strikes, amphibians are often the first to go.

And, indeed, trouble has struck. According to the IUCN Red List, almost 20% of vertebrate species are currently classified as threatened by extinction. Some, including nature writer David Quammen, worry that if present trends continue, the Earth will fall into a mass extinction comparable to those in Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic, and Cretaceous periods, characterized by a loss of over 75% of species. This was confirmed by a study published in Nature in 2011. Recent patterns—"multiple, atypical high-intensity ecological stressors, including rapid, unusual climate change and highly elevated atmospheric CO2"—mirror those of past mass extinctions, say the authors of the study.

Certain Doom?

When I was in middle and high school, my parents and I used to canoe to the most sordid section of the muddiest marsh we could find. We put the stickiest seaweed in a Tupperware container where it lived, undisturbed, on my bedside table.

Slowly, critters hatched out from the murk. All variety of creatures crawled out of the stagnant mess to explore. Usually the mosquitoes dominated the ecosystem. Tiny dots darted through the leaves and each other, growing into frenzied black clouds until finally the Tupperware was a thick fog of mosquito.

Suddenly, after weeks, it stopped. The water dirtied and all life—the jumpers and the swimmers and the crawlers and, finally, the champion mosquitoes—vanished.

Luckily for the axolotl, the probability of its extinction in present circumstances is low. A 2007 study by the National Autonomous University of Mexico determined that the population, while small, is stable. Furthermore, the 2011 Nature study warning of a sixth mass extinction concluded that the current loss of world biodiversity does not yet amount to one.

However, the same study that concluded that axolotls are safe also noted that their population consists primarily of one-year-olds—though axolotls can live up to 17 years in captivity—because pressure from predators and insufficient habitat kill most axolotls at a young age. The study concludes that a small reduction in egg and larvae survival rate increases the calculated probability of extinction within the next 20 to 50 years to 100%.

The same goes for the rest of the world. According to the 2011 Nature study, the extinction of those species currently marked as critically endangered would be enough to pull us irretrievably into a sixth mass extinction. After the species currently marked as endangered and vulnerable go extinct, the loss of biodiversity corresponding to a mass extinction will take only several centuries, orders of magnitude faster than the typical two million years. Our world would soon be unrecognizable.

Possible Solutions

According to the 2007 study by the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the best options for saving the axolotl are to restore their habitat to a state more conducive to the survival of eggs and young. This includes improving the quality of water, extricating foreign fish, and re-establishing Lake Xochimilco as more than a series of canals. Current efforts revolve around building axolotl "sanctuaries" in Lake Xochimilco, in which the axolotl are separated from the invasive fish by wooden gates. Another option, reintroduction (freeing lab-raised axolotl populations into the wild), has been considered but rejected, for fear of spreading chytrid fungus to and reducing the genetic diversity of the wild population. The possibility of introducing healthy captive populations into the wild has similarly been considered for saving other amphibian populations, but cautiously. In one case, the reintroduction of the Majorcan midwife toad introduced chytrid to the island of Majorca, infecting the reintroduced toads as well as other amphibians on the island.

Another option is to fight fungus with bacteria. Some amphibians naturally have symbiotic bacteria on their skin that produces antifungal agent, protecting them from chytrid. Culturing bacteria from healthy wild populations in the lab and then inoculating as yet untouched populations can boost their immunity.

This was attempted in 2008, when scientists captured all the tadpoles from a pond in Majorca, treated them with medication for chytrid, and, after draining the pond with a bucket and leaving the basin to dry in hopes of eradicating the fungus, reintroduced the tadpoles in hopes that they would survive to repopulate the region. This method lowered the level of infection, but it did not eradicate the fungus.

Lowering the level of infection may, however, be enough. A 2010 collaboration between the Oregon State University and the University of Colorado-Boulder concluded that the chytrid fungus requires a threshold of 10,000 zoospores per frog to initiate the collapse of an entire population. Since eliminating chytrid altogether does not seem realistic, reducing the amount of chytrid, perhaps by capturing frogs before the infection hits and treating them with antifungal agent, may be the best option. One method of achieving the effect on a larger scale, proposed in a 2011 study published in Nature, is to introduce these bacteria to soil in amphibian habitats.

Another option, proposed by a 2011 study published in Science, focuses on keeping species alive in captivity in zoos and aquariums around the world. Though the axolotl is threatened with extinction in the wild, for example, there are currently over 1000 axolotls in captivity at the University of Kentucky's Ambystoma Genetic Stock Center, which sends 15-20,000 axolotl embryos per year to labs worldwide. Captive populations could allow us to treat current problems before they lead to extinction, or to maintain the option of reintroducing the animals if their native habitat is restored.

Unfortunately, note the authors of the 2011 Science paper, only 3% of threatened amphibian species are represented in zoos. Overall, only 37% of threatened species and 18% of near-threatened species are represented in zoos. This is commendable, but not enough.

Biodiversity in Policy

The above solutions are regional and short-term. Solutions to the greater, directly human-caused problems of habitat destruction and global climate change must happen on a much broader scale. Cutting down our contributions to habitat destruction and climate change is the most difficult and most important thing we can do to preserve the world as we know it.

In 2002, at the first meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity, world leaders committed to significantly cut down extinction by 2010. 2010, in a similar manner, was declared the International Year of Biodiversity.

A 2010 analysis of data in the IUCN Red List and recent progress in conservation, published in Science, estimates that without our efforts to mitigate our effects on the environment, twice as many species would now be threatened with extinction. But this is not enough. We fell radically short of our goal of reducing extinction rates by 2010: the rate of biodiversity loss has not slowed, according to a 2010 report on progress toward the Convention's goals, also published in Science.

The 2010 analysis of the IUCN Red List insists that the only way to cut down biodiversity loss is to completely turn our act around: hope lies in "reversing detrimental policies, fully integrating biodiversity into broad-scale land-use planning, incorporating its economic value adequately into decision making, and sufficiently targeting, funding and implementing policies that tackle biodiversity loss, among other measures."

The Convention on Biological Diversity met again in 2010. The measures taken were not nearly as drastic as science has deemed necessary. Every year, according to the first 2010 analysis, an average of 52 vertebrate species move one Red List category closer to extinction—from vulnerable to endangered, from endangered to critically endangered, and, finally, from critically endangered to extinct. If we are to have any hope of preserving the world as we know it, we cannot afford another decade of falling short.

The foods highlighted in the six photos immediately below are apple swans, treacle tart, almond honey cake, deviled eggs, onigiri, and pork stew. The strawberry kiwi punch is HP potion. The blue Hawaiian punch is mana.

My advice to you—
If you brought homework, don’t do it. Meet people. Visit every dorm. Talk to fellow incoming freshmen and talk to upperclassmen. Don’t watch fun from a corner like I sometimes did. Finally, Random Hall has a step at the entrance. Don’t trip over it.

Tomorrow you should come to Meet the Bloggers so that you can meet us, the bloggers, and you should also come to Random Hall so that you can meet us, the Randomites. Next fall you might find yourself wanting to be a Randomite (or an honorary Randomite), too.

Also, someone who stopped by Random today recognized me and asked for a sticker because of something I said a year ago. If that lovely person is you and you would still like your sticker, please ask me again anytime this weekend or next semester and I will give you your well-earned sticker. If that lovely person is not you but you would nonetheless appreciate a sticker, please stop by Random Hall this weekend and I can give you a sticker, too. It can even have glitter on it, if you’d like.

What follows are this CPW’s super-exciting events at Random Hall:

For about six years MIT was my dream. I’d never been to MIT and my only link to MIT was the blogs, but I knew that if I got into MIT I would be happy, and I knew that if I got into MIT I would be the person I wanted to be.

That’s not true. Happiness is not a place.

In the following months I went to CPW, shopped for college stuff, and cried about leaving home. My parents dropped me and my stuff off at Random and left and finally I was alone with my boxes and my new life. The whole time I waited for some sign. This is it, it was going to say, I made it. Sometimes while walking through campus I notice the scenes I used to only see in photographs, and I remember how desperately I wanted to be here. This is MIT, and I am here. I taste the words and let them roll through my mind. All of my dreams have come true. Have I made it? Am I happy?

Inhale. Exhale.

You are super-cool. In the past 18 or so years you’ve already done amazing things, and you’ve learned a lot about yourself and your interests and where you might fit into this world. Over the next four years you will continue learning and doing amazing things, and you will continue to learn and do amazing things after you graduate. With luck, the amazing things you do will be much more impressive than getting into college.

I’ve realized over the past two years that the only thing I ever needed to be happy was my own permission. That isn’t something that MIT can give or take away, and it isn’t something that will appear or disappear because of what MIT tells you on Thursday. Regardless of your admissions decision, you will continue to be the good, intelligent person you are, and, if you let yourself, you can continue to be happy.

For the next two days, here’s some important advice from the decisions page:

We know that applying to college is stressful, and that the closer you get to receiving your admissions decisions, the easier it becomes to let that stress consume you. We encourage you to acknowledge it, embrace it, and then let it go. This is your last semester of high school, and your primary responsibility is to enjoy every remaining minute of this journey before you embark on the next.

Think about how you answered question 11a on our application ("what do you do purely for fun?"). Try to fill your days with that, and decisions will be here before you know it.

I was going to post some riddles to help you keep your mind off decisions, but then I realized that decades of MIT students have put a lot of energy into doing it for me. If you by any chance like to solve puzzles purely for fun, I recommend you explore the Mystery Hunt archives.

This year’s Mystery Hunt set at least two records: it was the longest hunt, at 73 hours and 18 minutes, and it also included the longest team name, the complete text of Atlas Shrugged, which ended up winning the hunt.

Hunt evolved from a chess game in 1981. It happens over Martin Luther King, Jr., weekend during IAP. Teams of people at MIT and people who just like puzzles solve puzzles all weekend long. Some of the puzzles are about languages, some of the puzzles are about songs, some of the puzzles are about math, and some of the puzzles require that you knit something. Some of the puzzles reveal more puzzles. There are metapuzzles, which are puzzles of puzzles, and there are also puzzles of puzzles of puzzles. At the end of the weekend, the puzzles culminate in an on-campus run-around puzzle to find a coin.

Mystery Hunt is a big deal at Random Hall. A friend of mine told me that Hunt is why she moved to Random, and that it was also one of the reasons she came to MIT. During Hunt, our dorm population increases from 93 to about 150. There’s a special headquarters within the dorm for reporting results, a special web site to facilitate communication throughout the team, and a special team of undergrads who cook a meal every six hours to accommodate round-the-clock puzzling.

This year’s Mystery Hunt is posted online here. If you’re looking for a place to start, below is a puzzle I enjoyed and worked on with my friend Catherine O. ‘12 (but didn’t end up solving), Czar Cycle:

None of us know Greek, one of us knows English, and the two of us know Russian, but we still can't understand this message.

Some other puzzles that alumni have particularly enjoyed are X2 from 2008 and Resolutions from 2009 (the "solutions" are not solutions—they are part of the puzzle).

You can also check out the decisions blog post I wrote last year, which is more insightful than this one and has links to more distractions. In addition, here are some kittens I found on the Internet playing with a Newton’s cradle, because when I’m stressed out I don’t actually do puzzles, I look at kittens.

Inhale. Exhale.

You can do this. Everything will be wonderful.

As thirty travel-weary MIT cyclists tetris’d their bags into the bottom of the bus, they collectively smiled—tomorrow they would be mounting their saddles and pedalling off into the deserts and mountains surrounding Borrego Springs, CA. They loaded their luggage and settled into their seats for the 80 mile drive from the airport, preparing mentally for the arduous rides ahead. After a particularly hilarious showing of Mean Girls, the bus rolled into the dust-covered hamlet, and deposited the MIT Cycling Team into their new home for the next week.

Groceries arrived by the truckload—800,000 calories of bananas, bread, English muffins, Cytomax, apples, chocolate, and all sorts of delicious consumables were ferried in to Hacienda la Verbena by the advanced food recon team of Shaena B. '13 and Jen W. (grad student in Biological Engineering). They had purchased so much food that other shoppers at Costco mistook their shopping cart for a store fixture, attempting to remove items for their own use.

After a night’s rest, the team woke up and cooked breakfast, then congregated in the garage where they were met by various alumni and affiliates for the day’s riding. For me, the first day consisted of a ride up through Yaqui Pass (a deceptively shallow climb to 1500’), followed by a wind-battered individual-time-trial along San Felipe road to 4200’, then a nerve-shatteringly terrifying descent down Montezuma Grade (10 miles downhill at 8% grade with sweeping views of the desert playa at nearly every corner). Video:

The ride terminated (as most rides ought to) in a hot tub. Once our muscles were soaked in the 102 degree water, many people opted to upload ride data to Strava and Golden Cheetah, comparing critical power curves and King of the Mountain/Queen of the Mountain (KoM/QoM) record attempts from the day’s assaults. After a particularly sumptuous dinner, I promptly fell asleep.

The next day was brutal—a brisk warmup paceline through town on the wheels of Zack U. and Ben W. (both Chemical Engineering) at 340 watts, followed by a series of intervals up Montezuma grade in a 40 mph headwind. As a sprinter, I thought there was nothing worse than an 80 minute climb through the mountains, but I revised my opinion on that: the wind proved to be more of an enemy than the gradient. Jen and I struggled mightily throughout the ascent, and at times it felt like we needed to maintain threshold power to simply stay upright in the face of the Aeolus’ blustery rage, but cresting the top of the pass to the silent smile of the Yeta at Ranchita Store kept us in good spirits. The descent was fraught with cross-winds, but after seeing the turns yesterday, I was able to punch it a little bit more on the downhills. Kamal N. '14 joined me in my quest for a downhill KoM, but we got stuck behind a semi-truck and had to abort our cannonball run.

Day three was a recovery day—more specifically, it was a day of “recoveracing” as the team captains led with a cornering clinic. Nate D. (Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences) demonstrated the principle of countersteering, and Zack and Shaena showed us how to get our bodies out over the side of the bike to change the center of gravity and allow tighter cornering lines. After the cornering clinic, the team completed a loop around town and came back for hot cocoa and lunch.

The next day brought Team Time Trial (TTT) practice in the same loop as the recovery ride—Ben graciously coached the Men’s C/D TTT team (me, Ernesto J. '14, Steven J. '11, Kamal, David R. (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science)) into good form, allowing us to blast down the highway at 25 mph. Flying past fruit orchards on perfectly coated pavement was the highlight of the trip for me, and I’m excited to get the TTT team back together in Boston this spring. After stopping over at the house to attempt to true my wheel (spoiler alert: I failed, and had Nate bail me out), I took off for Yaqui Pass to get some climbing miles in, but had to cut my ride short when my knee pain started to flare up.

The rest of the trip proceeded similarly—riding out in the morning for several hours, followed by after-ride snacks of nachos, guacamole, and/or hummus. Day five was the “hammer” ride, where the group treated a three mile section of road like a race, and wound up with a collective case of exercise-induced asthma. Or something. Read more about this in David K. (Biology)’s post here.

On day six, Peter Vanderwarker was kind enough to take professional-grade pictures of the team—we lined up for paceline photos and individual shots, then went out for another recovery ride in the desert.

On the final day (day eight—my knees were telling me to skip day seven’s ride), riders decided to go for broke. Nate (displeased with the teams in the super bowl, apparently) decided that he was going to ride until dark, and managed to do more than 100 miles with 10,000 feet of climbing. Zack even set the KoM record up the mountain at 305 W! I climbed Montezuma again with Jen, and we met up with Kate W. '14, Katie M. (Chemical Engineering), and Steven for a nice long downhill ride, opting to skirt Yaqui pass in favor of a longer route to the south. Kate and I spent much of the ride hammering hard on the front for five minute intervals, and I managed to set a five-minute power record on the last day!

Cleanup that night was bittersweet, as we packed our bikes into cases and wept for the loss of our beloved 49ers (well, okay, Zack was rooting for the Ravens the whole time, but Stephen (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) and I were upset). When the bus was packed in the morning, we rolled out to the airport and said our final goodbyes to the sweeping vistas of Southern California. After hundreds of miles of riding, and thousands of kilojoules spent, we took off for the frozen environs of Cambridge, MA with new stories to tell and new friends to race.

“Excuse me Professor!” yelled the first Logarhythm, who ran into the lecture hall like a superhero. “We’re here to deliver a message of love! Is Madeline here?”—Madeline raised her hand—“Would you like to join us in the aisle?”

By now the rest of the MIT Logarhythms were in the room. “Madeline,” one of them said, “meet the Logs.” And then, in unison, “Hi Madeline.” One of the boys kneeled. “We actually have a seat for you right here.” Madeline sat down on his knee and they surrounded her, some standing and some kneeling, and sang “Do You Believe in Love” by Huey Louis and The News, which begins:

I was walking down a one-way street 
Just a looking for someone to meet
One woman who was looking for a man

After the song they gave her a rose and the class applauded. As they ran out the door another Valentine’s Day superhero ran in: the first of the MIT Muses, an all-female a capella group. “Hi,” she said, “sorry to interrupt! We’re the MIT Muses. We’re looking for Iain Cheeseman.”

The class broke out in “Ooh!”s and laughter. “Don’t be shy!” said a Muse, and then it turned out that Iain was the professor sitting in the front row way on the other end of the room.

I want to interject here and say that Professor Cheeseman is an absolutely fantastic person. His lab is next to the Page lab on the fourth floor of the Whitehead Institute, so I’ve seen him around for the past two years and now I get to see him twice a week in class. I absolutely cannot be unhappy around him, no matter how determined I am. He radiates enthusiasm for life and for the material he teaches like a GFP-tagged protein under ultraviolet light.

The MIT Muses surrounded Professor Cheeseman in the front row and the class laughed again. They sang “1, 2, 3, 4” by the Plain White T’s, which goes:

There's only one thing to do
Three words for you: I love you
There's only one way to say
Those three words, and that's what I'll do: I love you

They gave him a small red bag containing what I assume is candy, said, “Happy Valentine’s Day!” and ran away. Professor Cheeseman got up to erase the board. “If I find out who did this, that’s like 10 points from your house.” (The class is split up into houses—recitations—named after the houses in the Harry Potter series. I’m in Slytherin.)

I’m thrilled that Professor Cheeseman got a Valentine’s Day serenade. It was adorable and awkward and happy and I felt giddy and happy and I couldn’t stop grinning in the hallways for the rest of the day. Luckily I was already recording the lecture on my Smartpen, and happened to also record the serenades to share with you. Here is the audio:

Type I and Type II proteins, which are mentioned toward the end, are two types of transmembrane proteins that stretch across the cell membrane. A Type I protein has an amine group (-NH₂) jutting out of the cell and a carboxyl group (-COOH) projecting into the inside of the cell. A Type II protein is the reverse: the carboxyl group end is on the outside of the cell and the anime group end is on the inside. Both have a large (about 25 amino acids) hydrophobic region that rests in the hydrophobic interior of the plasma membrane. Another type of transmembrane protein is the polytopic protein. It crosses the cell membrane multiple times (and has multiple long hydrophobic stretches).

Right now we’re learning about how proteins are customized for their environments, how the cell distributes proteins to where they belong, and how proteins are marked for distribution. Intracellular protein transport is as elegant and complex as a retail distribution network in our human-sized world. Unfortunately MIT open courseware (OCW) doesn’t have notes or video from 7.06 lecture, but 7.012 (Introductory Biology) has a lecture on protein localization that you can watch from home.

In case you’re wondering what a Valentine’s Day serenade looks like, here’s a video of an MIT Logarhythms serenade from last year that I found on YouTube. (I’m endlessly floored by how amazing our a capella groups are. Every song they cover sounds infinitely better than the original.)

After 7.06 I went to 7.33/6.049 (Evolutionary Biology), where we talked about the impact of sex on evolution, and then I went to lab, where I read about the X chromosome and X inactivation, and then I went home. My boyfriend and I had sushi with forks and milk from champagne glasses and it was sappy and romantic and happy and wonderful.

Happy belated Valentine’s Day!

I don’t personally know Hendrik, but I do know Brandon. Brandon lived in Random Hall as an undergrad, back when Clam and Bonfire were close and New Texas (Destiny) was mostly Texans. He studied Brain and Cognitive Sciences; specifically, he was interested in the neural basis of vision. He was a second-year cruft (cruft [krʌft]: noun; old electronics junk or alumni who still hang out) when I was a freshman. I initially knew him as the guy who spilled apple cider on my math homework. Eventually I got to know him as the guy who lights up any and every room and day and you know you won’t get any homework done when he’s around because you’ll be too busy laughing and being happy. Now he’s at Vanderbilt, where he continues to study vision.

This evening I Facebook chatted interviewed Brandon about his experience on King of the Nerds.

How did you get on the show?
I was contacted by casting and asked to make an audition video. I did and they liked it so they flew me out to film! I can only imagine that they must have had my info from when I was a finalist for the canceled final season of Beauty and the Geek.

What did they feed you?
All of the meals were catered and it was all pretty good stuff tailored to the food restrictions that people had (for instance, Hendrik was a vegetarian I think). It was all pretty good stuff actually. Plus we had snacks and lots of Arrogant Bastard Ale.

What did you do off-camera? Did they control your sleep schedule?
We were never off camera. They were filming us 24 hours a day. Sleep schedule was up to the individual but we had to be up and ready for the morning's activities.

When did the morning's activities start?
Usually right after breakfast. Around 9AM maybe?

What did you do in your free time?
I spent most of my time making things in the electrical engineering lab or hanging out with my awesome team mates.

Did you hang out with people from the opposite team or were you split up socially?
I hung out with some of the members of the opposite team but I got along better with the members of the orange team. They were more on my wavelength. Danielle and I got to be really good friends. I also got along super well with Moogega and Ivan.

What did you build in the EE lab?
I built a lot of fun little things. I made a sound effects module for Moogega's raven staff, the variable rate strobe LED skull for my costume, an FM radio receiver, a DC power supply, and a voice changer. (And probably some other stuff that I can't remember.) Oh wow. For the costumes used in episode 2? Yup! Well, the first two things were for the costumes. The rest were not. The gadgets were not prebuilt—they had some kits but some of us (Moogega and I) have experience with this sort of thing.

Was anything scripted?
Nothing that the contestants said or did was scripted. (at least speaking for myself) The people portrayed on the show are very accurate depictions of how things really were.

How wonderful was it to get to meet George Takei? Did you get to hang out with him more than was shown in episode 2?
It was AWESOME to meet George Takei. We did get to talk with the judges for a little while more intimately than was shown on TV but it was a brief meeting. No super extended hanging out. George Takei is an awesome person, by the way. How so? He just has a great sense of humor and did not mind the awestruck reactions that he received from us. He just kind of joked around and was the happy good natured guy that he always appears to be!

Do you think the show did a good job of capturing nerd, the concept?
Contestants: We had almost a perfect split of men and women as well as nerds from all walks of life: gamers, comic book nerds, and academics alike. I think they did a phenomenal job at showcasing the breadth of different nerd subcultures. Competitions: Given that this is the first season and they have to make everything flashy while conserving money I think they did a pretty decent job but if they renew for more seasons I think that it will be an even better set of challenges.

What was your favorite thing about being on the show?
I think the whole experience in general was my favorite thing. How many people can say that they were on a reality TV show (one in which the dignity of the contestants is intact no less!)

What was your least favorite thing about being on the show?
The lack of privacy. Sometimes you just want to be alone. Also not being able to contact anyone in the outside world while you are there was kind of a pain. Really? No one at all? Not even your mom? Nope, no one. Complete radio silence. You couldn't even get on Facebook from their computers? Nope!

What did you bring with you to Nerdvana?
I brought a bunch of clothes, some books, and a couple of my costume pieces because I had a hunch there would be cosplay involved. What books? The complete fiction of HP Lovecraft and a couple of neuroscience books.

What was the first thing you did when you got back home?
I checked my email! It was not that bad actually. My prof at the time sent me a revised copy of my manuscript that I obviously could not continue drafting while I was gone...but she knew I was out.

Did you stay in contact with your costars after the show?
Yup! We've been trying to organize a reunion!

Do people recognize you in real life?
Yeah! I've been recognized at karaoke a few times because of my commercial.

King of the Nerds is not the type of show I would normally watch, because like in Big Bang Theory the characters don’t seem abnormal and the jokes are sometimes too close to home to be funny. But we love Brandon and we do watch King of the Nerds, together every Thursday in Destiny lounge. If you are curious about nerds, about Brandon, or about reality television, you can tune in too. Here is that commercial:

Toward the end of September I became noticeably stressed out. I stopped talking to people, I stopped cleaning my room, and I got very lonely. It culminated in an hour-long cry session after a benign meeting with my biology professor about a class presentation.

“Cory,” I said to my boyfriend, “nobody loves me.”

“Nonsense,” he replied, “I love you.”

“I want to go home,” I said. “My mommy loves me.”

Then I watched an episode of America’s Next Top Model and felt better. America’s Next Top Model makes everything better.

“Have I always been this crazy?” I asked Cory.

“Well,” he said, “you’ve always been a little crazy. It’s only recently that you’ve become comprehensively insane.”

That afternoon I went to S^3. “I think I’ve gone insane,” I said.

I have a fantastic dean at S^3. Last year, I also came in feeling overwhelmed. We spent the half hour appointment talking about personal genomics and when I left I felt perfectly fine. This time, it took about three minutes for him to identify a medication I’ve been on that sometimes causes emotional instability. Two days later I had a procedure at MIT Medical to replace the medication. It was the most physically painful experience I’ve had. It stretched to four hours and left me nonfunctional for the next three days, and then it was over.

The next week was my primary hell week of the term. It was doubled by the work I had to make up from the previous week and I did not do much other than study. There were lots of naps and not enough sleep, and there was a lot of frozen food. I stopped talking to people again. I stopped cleaning my room. I missed my dorm’s annual apple picking event. I got very lonely and I started to wonder if I’ll ever retain enough information about the world contribute to our understanding of it.

After my final all-nighter I woke up to someone waddling down the alley below my window and swearing angrily. I went to lab, had a conversation with my supervisor about grad school and grades and my future in the lab, and stumbled home crying in the theatrically-placed light rain. When I got home, I broke. I turned into a spiky blob of yelling and crying, completely freaked out my poor boyfriend, drank some cold water, and fell asleep.

Friday evening I went to visit my high school friend Eric at Tufts.

My dad tells me that when he and my mom were at PhysTech, the Russian counterpart to MIT, he went out to Moscow on weekends just to see other faces. There’s something about seeing the same people every day, and all of us with similar problems, and seeing your particular misery reflected back at you everywhere you look. Visiting Tufts was like inhaling after holding my breath.

The people I met were beautiful. They were relaxed, they were happy, and they didn’t have bags under their eyes. There was a spark, an extra degree of freedom, a young, harmonious vitality. The people around me were spending Friday experimental baking or jazz dancing until the AM hours. I didn’t see anyone studying. They were just having fun, and they were doing it guilt-free and not under the guise of putting off homework. There was something exciting and completely unpredictable about the situation: we might bake! we might dance! we might run out into the cold without our coats! It felt good to talk with someone completely new, and it felt good to be the nerdy one again.

We walked through vast lawns, past trees and scattered red brick houses with white columns. The buildings looked warm and inviting and none of them looked weird. For once, I didn’t want weird. The cold wind bit through my sweater, and the sting felt tangible in a way I hadn’t felt in a while.

“Why don’t you transfer out?” Eric asked.

“Why would I do that?”

We stopped on top of the library to look at the Boston skyline in the distance. The roof was lined with trees and a path of white arches, which looked like they should have grape vines or roses. It was quiet, except for the occasional airplane. I wondered if I could pick out the Green Building in the distance.

“I think I understand you,” Eric said, “I understand your priorities.”

“And what are my priorities?”

“You’re willing to maintain your mental health to the extent that it helps you be a good biologist. You’re willing to stay happy to the extent that it helps you be a good biologist.”

When I got home that night, Cory and I sat down on his bed and talked about how miserable we both were. Something needed to change. Anything. We decided to break up. Half an hour later he came up to my room to collect his Lord of the Rings Legos.

“You forgot your spider,” I said, gesturing toward Shelob, who was hanging by his string from my bedframe.

He unhooked the spider and folded its legs in, one my one, slowly.

“I’m making it more compact,” he said. He wound the string up.

“The extra pieces are in the top shelf on my desk,” I said. I sat down at my desk, pulled the shelf out, and handed it to him. I picked his sweatpants up from on top of my dresser and handed those to him too.

He wrapped his Legos in his pants, folded them carefully, and got up by my chair. He looked around the room slowly, avoiding my eyes, and stepped closer to the door. We stared at each other without making eye contact for a few minutes.

“I don’t think I want to do this,” he finally said.

“Me neither,” I responded.

And we didn’t.

(Cory agreed to let me post this on the condition that the money I get for this blog post goes toward Legos. “This building is 16+. Are you sure we can handle it?” “Yes. We're only emotionally immature. Luckily we don’t build Legos with our feelings.”)

The next morning I went to Artist and Craftsman in Central Square and bought a new pencil sharpener, masking fluid, three erasers, mixed media paper, and three small brushes. I stopped by Shaw’s and bought apples, sharpened all my colored pencils, and spent the rest of the day coloring.

There was no swooping deus ex machina: not the operation, not Tufts, not the pencils, not the apples, not Legos, not boyfriends or the lack thereof. I hit the average on my exams, my supervisor ingenuously dreamt up my original life plan and presented it to me last week, and I’m still behind on work.

I’m trying to take it day by day, problem by problem, line by line. I’m calling my family more often, watching TV every now and then, and trying not to say no to opportunities to go outside. I’m trying to get nine hours of sleep a night, even if there’s work to do.

I don’t think many people understand what we mean when we say that MIT is hard. It’s not just the workload.

There’s this feeling that no matter how hard you work, you can always be better, and as long as you can be better, you’re not good enough. You’re a slacker, you’re stupid, and MIT keeps an overflowing warehouse of proof in the second basement of building 36. There’s stress and there’s shame and there’s insecurity. Sometimes there’s hope. Sometimes there’s happiness. Sometimes there’s overwhelming loneliness.

There’s something to giving everything and always falling short. Eventually we’ll walk out with a deep understanding of our fields, a fantastic tolerance for failure and late nights, and raised expectations for ourselves and for humankind. Someday, we’ll look back on these four years as the best years of our lives and the foundations of the kinds of friendships that can only be formed with some suffering. But right now, IHTFP. Sometimes it feels like MIT drags your self-esteem over a jagged, gravely rockface and stretches your happiness, your mental health, and the passion and energy that brought you here like an old rubber band.

I love this place. I love the amazing people I’ve met, I love watching myself grow as a scientist and a writer, and I love being engulfed in the heart of scientific progress and passion and feeling like I belong. At the same time I’m miserable, sometimes. IHTFP is the middle of the semester, when the lounges off the Infinite Corridor fill up with sleeping people, when I don’t leave the dorm except to go to class or to lab, when I can’t go apple picking because I’m hosed, and when the faces around me reflect my own anxiety. IHTFP is studying my butt off to hit the average, crying about my grades, and then helping a freshman with his homework and realizing how much better I’ve become at patiently disentangling a challenge.

MIT is paradise. I cry sometimes. I love it here. My only consolation is that the salt in my tears will squelch any unsuspecting plants they land on. It’s beautiful. That's right, unsuspecting Killian Court grass, wither. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

Background:

I love writing. I love building on thoughts I can’t put words to, reading them back, and rewriting them until they feel true. I love knowing that I’ve said something I couldn’t say before and feeling like I’ve grasped a new emotion.

Admissions essays are intimidating. You’re condensing four years into 250-word essays. To do that you have to understand and acknowledge yourself and your growth, say goodbye to this stage of your life, and understand yourself as your own person. People who read your application will know you in a way you might not have known yourself.

Luckily MIT tells you exactly what they want:

• Alignment with MIT's mission to make the world a better place
• Collaborative and cooperative spirit
• Initiative
• Risk-taking, or resilience and the ability and willingness to handle failure
• Hands-on creativity
• Intensity, curiosity, and excitement, also known as passion
• The ability to balance your coursework with more interesting things, like labwork, hobbies, and sleep
• Being a good person

In other words, MIT wants to see from your application that you

1. are academically qualified to handle the MIT curriculum. This part’s the easiest. It should be covered by the classes you took and your grades and your SAT scores. I won’t touch on it again. You shouldn’t need to touch on it again in your application.
2. will like it here. Are you social, in the sense that you can build a support network and enjoy things that aren’t classes? Are you resilient? Will you fall apart at your first few Cs? Will you still give your all the semester after?
3. will add to the student body. Do you have an interesting past, an interesting worldview, and interesting hobbies?
4. will do cool things with your MIT education. Do you have hopes and dreams? Do you have the initiative and courage to make them happen?

Procedure:

Think about how the choices you made throughout high school reflect these qualities. Some of them are already in your application: the classes you took, the grades you got, and your extracurricular activities. Think about what the people you asked for recommendation letters might say about how you interact with your peers and teachers, and what your interviewer might say about what you’re like in person. For each quality, list what your application will already have. Any gaps will need to be filled in with your essays. For each quality, especially sparse ones, list experiences or ideas that highlight that quality. They don’t all have to be academic. It might be more interesting if some of them aren’t.

Read the application essay prompts. Notice that they are framed around those same qualities. Jot down the first answers that come to mind for each question, including stories and examples where possible. It’s okay to use snippets from essays you’ve written before, if they reflect your personality and are relevant to the question. Think about if and how the experiences you listed earlier fit into the list of qualities. If you decide not to include them, make sure you still cover the list. Before you start writing, look through your notes and make sure there aren’t gaps.

Write. This is the hardest part and the least fun, so do it fast. Last semester my friend Amy ’13 showed me Write or Die. It's helpful for writing fast. It saved my GPA last semester.

Take a break when writing gets difficult. I find it helpful to take a shower. I also like to read something short by a writer I admire to warm up my voice. If you can’t think of anything I recommend Coraline by Neil Gaiman. It’s concise, well paced, and creative. You might also listen to music that matches your essay’s emotion and isn’t distracting. I like writing to Lana Del Rey. She has a consistent beat, little variation in pitch, and words that blend into the music. She can be horribly depressing but she can keep me in the zone for hours.

Revision 1, as you write or immediately after. If it comes naturally, try to include stories, dialogue, and descriptions, and to use more specific examples and images than general statements. Minimize adjectives and adverbs; instead, pick nouns and verbs that come as close as possible to the meaning you’re aiming for. Use a thesaurus if you have to. Avoid any cliché phrases that you hear or read often. Avoid very, a lot, completely, and totally, which are usually meaningless. Minimize is, has, of, under, over, on, in, heavy words which slow the pace and make your essay less engaging. Control your use of maybe, possibly, it seems, and I think. These phrases make you seem less confident as a narrator, which is useful sometimes but not usually in an admissions essay. If you’re feeling bold, add some alliteration and parallelism to connect important, related ideas. Be careful: if it feels forced it will be counterproductive.

Pay attention to how you group words. There’s a certain power in a sentence that is more or less constant. Shorter sentences usually condense power, while longer sentences diffuse it. A separation between the subject and its verb will diffuse power: the longer the separation, the less power per word. Anything in the gap between the subject and the verb is less likely to have an impact on the reader.

If you want to diffuse power you can do it by slowing the pace. Create pauses with commas and use heavy words, passive voice, maybe even an adjective or two. It can be interesting to soften the apex of your essay: you can make softer emotions feel more genuine and sick things feel more horrifying by putting them in a long, diffused sentence.

On the other hand, you can condense power to shock or to exaggerate the apex of a paragraph or your essay. Use as few syllables and commas as you can and make sure that every word you do use captures your meaning perfectly. Do not separate a subject and its verb.

An exception is endings: the end is the most powerful part of a sentence, paragraph, or essay. It’s conventional to put background or context information at the start of your sentence, paragraph, or essay and to put the more important conclusions and new information at the end. Sometimes people put a powerful short sentence at the end of an essay or story to maximize its impact. Unfortunately this often backfires: a short sentence at the very end of an essay implies a very meaningful epiphany or plot twist; if you don’t deliver, the reader will be confused and your target emotion will disappear.

When you’re satisfied, leave your essays alone.

Revision 2, in a week or two. Reread your essays out loud. In this revision you are looking for what I call emotional lies. Catch and rephrase anything that sounds awkward or forced. Remove parallels and alliteration that feel forced. Make sure every word has the meaning in context you want it to have; use the thesaurus again if you have to. Follow the tone and the big picture as you read your application. Make sure it reflects you. It might not match the tone and big picture you envisioned in the beginning. The important thing is that it’s an accurate picture of you.

Quality Control and Safety:

I recommend you find one person to help you revise. I was lucky to have a mutual editing relationship with my dad. Try to find someone who knows you well, has read your writing before, and is a good writer. Preferably your editor will be more mature than you, not in your English class, and not involved in their own college admission process. Give them MIT’s list of qualities and start letting them read at the end of your second revision. Ask them to read after every revision. They’re there to catch awkwardness or emotional lies that you miss, and to check that the picture you’ve painted is true.

If you still have time, leave your essays alone again, for longer this time. Then reread them again to make sure they're still as good as you thought they were.

Good luck, and have fun. Please don’t spend Halloween editing admissions essays. =)

EDIT: I didn't realize it at first, but there are two texts that greatly influenced my writing and this blog post. If you'd like more (and better) advice, check out

• "The Science of Scientific Writing" by Gopen and Swan, which we read recently in 7.02 (Introduction to Experimental Biology and Communication)
• and The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, which has been recommended by many of my writing professors.

You should also check out Chris Peterson's blog post on writing admissions essays.

Sleeping in a loft has several benefits. First, I don’t have a bedside table or shelf, which means I can’t bring my laptop or a book to bed unless I want it to fall out the window. Sleep ends up separate from everything else, which I’ve heard can help a person fall asleep faster. Second, since I sleep next to an open window I get a cool breeze at night and the light of the sun in the morning. Every night feels like camping, and I usually wake up without an alarm between 7:30 and 8:00. The result is regularity in my sleep schedule. Remarkably I’ve started feeling rested on seven or eight hours of sleep, which never used to be enough. A third, unexpected benefit is that I start every morning panicking about which direction I shoved my plushies in my sleep. By the time I scan the alleyway four stories down and find them on my bedroom floor I’m usually quite awake.

Under my loft I made a cozy space that is also isolated: it has a window, some plushies, including my giant turtle, and a small shelving unit with yarn, my Legos, and only my favorite books (science fiction and a population genetics textbook—no GRE prep book). There’s a green curtain I can pull across the loft to block out the rest of the world and a touch lamp shining into the cave. It’s become a happy childish shelter from stressful reality.

There are a few other simple, mostly inexpensive things I’ve accumulated over the past two years that have greatly enhanced my quality of life at MIT.

Lamps

I spent my first semester crammed into a small half and I handled the situation all wrong. I tried to make a second story by lofting a queen sized airbed on a lofted bed frame and a shelving unit, which backfired by blocking my one window and blanketing the space below the loft and the reach of the already dim ceiling lamp (most of my room) in darkness. I’m smarter now! In addition to my dim ceiling lamp I have a three-setting floor lamp and two desk lamps, one on my desk and one (a touch lamp, also three-setting) facing the cozy cave below my loft. I have 2*2*4*4=64 options for the lighting in my room, not including my windows. I think having control over the light in my room has contributed heavily to my happiness.

Alarm clocks

I have two alarm clocks: a radio alarm clock for almost always and an obnoxious Clocky alarm clock for actually waking up. Clocky rolls away while squealing in a variety of obnoxious pitches. It’s impossible to sleep though and great for pre-midterm naps. (Accidental seven-hour naps were a staple of my freshman year. Don’t let them take over yours.) Clocky is especially nice combined with my loft. I can’t leave it in my bed because I don’t want it to roll out the window, so when I do use Clocky I have to climb out of bed to turn it off.

Intense hat from Russia

Fall semester freshman year I got a double ear infection (double earn infection, all across my productivity!) that wiped me out for about two weeks. S^3 and medical can only help you so much when you’ve missed 20 lectures and eight p-sets and maybe an exam or two. My grandparents in Russia shipped me an ушанка from Russia and I haven’t gotten an ear infection since. Of course I look like this in the winter, but it’s worth it:

A black and white printer

A personal printer is not necessary. There are printers all over campus and in the dorms. Having your own printer is helpful if your dorm’s printer starts spitting black streaks across everything and you want neither zebra p-sets nor to trek to campus.

Electric tea kettle

You’ll need one for the ginormous tea collection you’ll inevitably accumulate after your first three trips to Shaw’s (our local grocery store). Microwaving cups of water loses its novelty after a week.

Water floss

Did you know that when you wake up in the morning you wake up with 600 species of bacteria colonizing your teeth? Water floss can’t replace actual floss but it’s better than no floss at all when you’re hosed. It’s fun, like a water fight in your mouth.

Beanbag

When I first came to MIT I bought a butterfly chair, which collapsed when I tried to fit more than three people on it. A beanbag is much better.

Corkboard for jewelry

I have a lot of beautiful jewelry my grandparents gave me but until this semester I’ve kept it in a box. Unfortunately this meant I could only wear the jewelry I remembered, and only if I had time to pick it out in the morning. At the start of term I hung all my necklaces and earrings on a large corkboard, and bought a smaller corkboard for p-sets. Now everything is visible and I can wear pretty things more often.

Clementine box charger dock

When they’re in season you can buy crates of clementines at Shaw’s. After demolishing the clementines take a look at the crates: they are wooden, stackable, and easily taken apart. If you flip them over, there are holes at the top that are perfectly sized for a charger cord, and the surface is just large enough to hold a cell phone and a PDA and an MP3 player. If you bend back and remove the staples holding it together, you can remove walls of the box, exposing space for you to put things inside. If you stack them you can build a customizable shelving unit.

Things that are yours

It’s become important to me that my space feels mine, so that when my life outside is collapsing, at least something feels consistent and right. Blank Institvte white walls are depressing. If you can paint your room you should. If you can’t, you can buy curtains online and a rug at Shaw’s. If you can, bring some junk from home to remind you of the world outside the bubble. I brought a lucky $2 bill, lucky pennies from 1992, a tiny pig figurine from a camping trip, a tiny cat figurine from my grandparents, a pet rock my little brother made me, and ticket stubs from trips home. You should also buy blankets and pillows and plushies. Lots of blankets and pillows and plushies. I love soft things.

A fish

I bought Hephaestus sometime this summer, from the Pet-Co a mile and a half from Random. My boyfriend and I picked out the fish and the fish bowl and the rocks and the fish food and the bamboo plant and the fish hammock and lugged it all home and put it together. The whole process took about five hours.

It’s comforting when you’re hosed and stressed out to see a living thing swimming, carefree, his red fins swaying in currents that only he creates, living an existence independent of classes and p-sets where he can socialize as long as he wants with his two friends, the bamboo plant and his reflection, his thoughts and his dreams limited only by the walls of his 1 gallon fish bowl. It’s reassuring that there’s a world without homework floating in the stagnant waters of freedom that you haven’t changed in at least a month, to be reminded of and glad for your own intriguing fish bowl and inspired to work twice as hard on that p-set you really should have been staring at instead of a fish.

I am back with my biweekly vlog update, quite late because I am lazy have been preoccupied with my schedule. I've been wonderful! Classes have started! REX happened! Politics is happening! Blogging is happening! Science is happening! And I decided not to twitter anymore because I'm not at my laptop enough. Isn't that astonishing?

Here is a riddle for today:

You have 2012 jars of 1-kg mollusks, with 2012 1-kg mollusks in each jar. The local dumpster cat gang has raided one jar, leaving 2012 0.3-kg resealed mollusk shells in that jar. You need to figure out which jar they raided before you take the mollusks to market. Your evil neighbor, a competing mollusk hunter who owns the dock’s only mollusk scale, insists that you can identify the lighter jar by performing only one measurement, and refuses to let you use his scale more than once. How can you identify the jar of empty mollusk shells by performing only one measurement on your neighbor’s scale? Hint: while you cannot open the mollusks, you may open the jars and you may remove mollusks from the jars.

For extra credit, solve last time's riddle:

There are two solutions. The meaning of the words is irrelevant. Don't let the cyrillic stop you.

Have a wonderful day!  =)

Tea, chain mail, math, raves. Pillow fights, python, puzzles, pancakes.
Truffles, nerf guns, chess. Chess with nerf guns. Come to Random.

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:

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.

I used to see Penn State, and still see Penn State, as a large research university. That and football were what people usually mentioned when I said I was from State College, the town surrounding Penn State’s main campus, or when I said I went to Penn State for a year. Now there's a sudden, gossipy thrill not far beneath some expression of shock, and that’s it. State College has never gotten as much attention as it has over the past seven months. It’s sad to me that the Sandusky scandal has enveloped the world’s perception of what I know as a good town.

What is now State College was originally farmland and forest. When Penn State was founded in 1855 it was called the Farmers' High School of Pennsylvania, and then the Agricultural College of Pennsylvania in 1862. The town is still surrounded by farms: two blocks from our street, suburbia melts into farmland, and then farmland melts into purple mountains. We buy milk directly from a family-owned dairy farm. Most of our vegetables come from the farmers’ market.

Penn State’s campus fits perfectly into the land it sits on. There are immense green lawns, interrupted by trees and wide red brick streets. There are old, grey buildings from the 1850s and just as many new buildings, made of the same red brick. Mountains surround the town and campus. The land glows from within itself, especially after the rain, and there is no smell to the air but that rain.

State College residents value their community. In the five years that I lived here I saw what I thought were unusual amounts of kindness and thoughtfulness, and I saw, more than I’ve seen in Chicago, Moscow, or Cambridge, people seeing each other in a trusting, positive light. The result is a strong, cohesive community and a remarkably low crime rate. State College has been ranked one of the least stressful places in the United States, the safest small city in America, and one of the best places to live or start a business. There are huge community-centered, community-run events, including the third largest 4th of July fireworks in the U.S., the summer Arts Fest, and THON, a student-organized fundraiser, culminating in a two-day dance marathon, that this year raised more than 10 million dollars toward pediatric cancer. People here are kind, upbeat, and genuinely optimistic. It’s contagious. Every time I come home I return a revitalized, happier person.

It’s important to know that there are families in State College with multiple generations of Penn Staters. Students start out in one of eight geographically separated elementary schools and advance to two geographically separated middle schools. Finally the entire student population merges into one high school with a graduating class of 570 students. Most State High graduates move on to Penn State, which consists largely (69% of main campus students) of their peers from other Pennsylvania high schools (—which does not result in a bad education. Penn State is ranked 64th worldwide by The Center for World University Rankings, and the high school has been rated a top high school by Newsweek). After college, enough Penn State students stay put and raise families here to renew the cycle. 56% of Penn State’s living alumni are still in Pennsylvania. Of the 6% who are in Centre County, many have parents, grandparents, or children who also grew up here.

Moving here from Chicago in 8th grade felt like settling into Leave It to Beaver. The town is largely shielded from the recession by Penn State's economic bubble, and the region is often called Happy Valley or Pleasant Gap. The population is 83.2% white, mostly middle class, and largely Christian. The style of dress is more homogeneous than it is in cities. Land is relatively cheap, so many people live in suburban-style homes with large lawns. I remember asking a boyfriend in high school why he didn’t want to move away someday. He told me that there’s a feeling of safety from being surrounded by the mountains, and that he would never want to be without it.

I don’t think I ever understood football, though I do feel connected to the town. I watched a football game once, on television, at a party. There were lots of adults in Penn State jerseys and there was a lot of food. I remember thinking it was awfully boring, but that it was still exciting because other people thought it was exciting. During football weekends, the town population seemed to double. Traffic downtown became awful. There was suddenly litter on the streets. I could hear the cheering at Beaver Stadium from our house, four miles away.

From what I understand, to many people, especially the rooted alumni that make up the cultural core of the town, football in State College represents a moral coming of age, an iconic American transition from boyhood to manhood. It represents the absorption of the values, especially hard work, integrity, and service to the community, that make a safe town like Happy Valley possible.

As you might imagine, these values don’t actually play out on the football field. They happen through coaching. What we watch when we watch football is the result. It makes sense, then, that the coach who instills those values in the football players would become a role model to the bulk of the community that watches. For the past 61 years, through three generations, Joe Paterno was that coach. He became the personification of the values we strive to achieve in ourselves and to see in our town.

And he didn’t seem undeserving of the role. He and his wife donated $4 million to Penn State—funding scholarships, faculty, a spiritual center, and the expansion of the Pattee Library—and another $1 million to the Mount Nittany Medical Center. When one of his players left to care for his five-year-old son who had terminal brain cancer, Paterno donated money to him anonymously, through his church, on a monthly basis. (A clerical error by a secretary revealed that Paterno was the anonymous monthly donor.) His modesty, hard work, attention to detail, and valuing internally defined excellence over externally defined success became known as the Paterno way. Over decades Joe Paterno the idea became much bigger than Joe Paterno the person. He was like family to the entire community.

Seven months ago State College fell apart. It came to light that Jerry Sandusky, Joe Paterno's assistant coach, had, over 15 years, raped young boys he'd met through the charity he founded for underprivileged and at-risk youth. He was later found guilty on 45 of 48 charges. The media flooded the town. Joe Paterno was fired. Students rallied against the media. Joe Paterno was diagnosed with cancer and died. The town felt sadness, anger, and loss. The NCAA retroactively discounted over a decade of wins under Paterno, fined Penn State $60 million, limited Penn State football scholarships for the next four years, and banned Penn State from bowl games for the next four years. The legacy of Paterno, of Penn State, and of State College began slipping away, in the hands of a child rapist and people who have never even been here, many of whom had never heard of State College or Joe Paterno before last November. Meanwhile the community was and still is grasping at the moral, peaceful way of life we’ve grown used to.

Joe Paterno did not deserve the burden of the things he symbolized. It’s terrible that someone who turned out to have potentially concealed and enabled child rape simultaneously captured our hearts and embodied our moral compass. But he did. I hope you can understand why many people are in disbelief, why many people in State College continue to support him, cherish him, and view his legacy in a positive light, and why the community of State College is in turmoil: because the values that Joe Paterno symbolized, that we trusted him with, have and continue to hold the community together, have made and continue to make it great, and cannot be let go of.

Voices from the community:

I’m not a child abuse survivor, but I’ve lived through other forms of abuse, and I’m still trying to deal with the fallout in terms of my mental health. This town is not a safe space for me right now. There’s so much triggering and offensive language being tossed around cavalierly—people referring to themselves as “abuse victims” or “another victim of Sandusky” or talking about being “victimized” by the media—it just seems like people are thinking about this from an incredibly entitled and privileged standpoint, without the firsthand experience necessary to understand the gravity of the word “abuse”. That’s never something which should be used lightly. I’ve lost so much faith and trust in my community over the last couple of weeks, and this is a place I really care about. I wish people would think twice about the fact that Sandusky’s victims are not the only survivors living in this community—and by that I really, really don’t mean residents who aren’t going to be able to watch bowl games, I mean other child abuse survivors, people who’ve been raped, been emotionally abused, experienced physical domestic violence. I’d be much more likely to respect and sympathize with people who have a problem with the NCAA sanctions if they were talking about them and reacting to them in a measured, respectful way, without drawing weird and completely inappropriate rhetorical parallels between them not being able to watch bowl games and abuse—but most of what I’ve seen has just made me realize how many people in my community still just don’t get it, and made this town into a really uncomfortable and unpleasant place to be.

–Anonymous State High graduate and lifelong State College resident

We live in a rape culture. We live in a culture in which one of six boys is a victim of sex abuse and one of four women is a victim of rape. We live in a culture in which the leaders of one of America’s largest universities believed it would be “more humane” to tell Jerry Sandusky to seek counseling than to report him to the authorities. Where leaders believe that giving a pedophile the chance to reform himself is more important than stopping him from raping more boys. We live in a society in which the experiences of victims of child abuse are ignored and their voices unheard. Where the average victim of child abuse must tell nine different people before their abuse is reported to the police. Where reporting suspected child abuse to the authorities is not recognized as a basic moral obligation. Where many people claim that were they in Paterno’s position they would have done the same thing. That they too would have enabled rape.

We live in a rape culture. If we are lucky enough to have never been raped, its survivors are all around us. But usually, they walk unknown among us. How can they make themselves known when their perspectives and feelings are routinely ignored? How can they make themselves known if we tell them that we revere a rape enabler? When we revere Joe Paterno there is a good chance we are hurting someone we hold dear, telling them that their pain is insignificant, that the enabling of rape is a small mark on an otherwise exceptional life, that the pain of rape victims is less important than our feelings about the man. We are creating a space that is unsafe for them, a space in which they cannot feel comfortable sharing their feelings and experiences.

We live in a rape culture. But we can change this culture. By insisting that no rape enabler is worthy of statues, tributes, or reverence. By thus sending the message that reporting the rape of children is a basic human obligation. By seeking out the voices of survivors of rape and sex abuse. By listening to what they say about how the symbols and discourse of rape culture affect them rather than drawing our own misguided conclusions. By educating ourselves about the fact that while children almost never lie about being sexually abused, they are routinely disbelieved. By committing ourselves to communicating allegations of sexual abuse directly to the police. By insisting that the prevention of the rape of children is a central goal of our society. And finally and most importantly, by listening to its survivors and according their feelings, experiences and requests the upmost weight in what we say and do.

–Ben G., State High graduate and lifelong State College resident

I grew up in a home that loved football—Penn State Football. I had a PSU barbie cheerleader and my mom taught me all of the cheers: "I say blue; you say white. BLUE. WHITE. BLUE. WHITE. I say JoePa; you say Terno. JOEPA. TERNO. JOEPA. TERNO." The chorus of "The Nittany Lion (Hail to the Lion)" was my lullaby growing up. I loved Penn State. PSU football meant family bonding, good food, and a good game. So of course when the time came for college, PSU was where I wanted to go. It had a lot of majors and I was undecided, my family was close, and how could I be loyal to any other football team? I didn't think PSU was always the best team, but they are always MY TEAM, and State College is MY HOME. There is nothing like going downtown on a football Saturday and seeing all of the people, or in June when all of the college students are gone and campus is peaceful. So naturally, when disaster was revealed in our Happy Valley this fall, I was torn to pieces. State College was ranked the safest U.S. metropolitan area by the Congressional Quarterly (City Crime Rankings 2009-2010). Nothing had ever happened like this. Not Here. I was heartbroken as I read what Sandusky had done in the Grand Jury Report. Seeing all of the news trucks around campus for weeks was like rubbing salt in the wound. When Joe was fired, I saw my town, my home, get destroyed by students in the streets. I went downtown that night; I saw my peers tearing light posts out of the ground. It broke me to see that the only response to our anger was destruction. I knew a lot of people were planning on going home that next weekend—they wanted to get away. I had nowhere to go; this is my home and the walls seemed to be crumbling around me.

No one knows exactly what Joe knew or didn't know about Sandusky's actions—Yes I read the Freeh report, but in this world anything can be fabricated or altered. Regardless, I cannot judge Joe's actions. I have never had my coworker, a friend, accused of raping children and in all honesty I would probably tell my superior to give them the benefit of the doubt. Especially when the last time they were investigated, they were seen by Child and Youth Services as innocent. I have made mistakes before. I am human. I also know that we have a just God, who is the only Judge, and that it is not my place to say Joe is or is not innocent.

Looking back, everything that Joe has done for my town and university is almost overwhelming. Without our football program, we would not have funding for almost any other sports. We would not have the library that I study in. We would not have the new church that is about to open on Park Ave. We would not have many of the businesses downtown that thrive ONLY because of football weekends. We would not have the motels and hotels in the area for local jobs. I also know, if PSU gets the death penalty, State College will get the death penalty. Our Happy Valley will be crushed economically. My town will become a ghost town as businesses go out, and sports teams don't get funding. When money stopes coming in from the football program, we will have to get it from other places and possibly cut back on research—like the research PSU is doing to find the cure for cancer in Hershey. Lift for Life will not get the $100,000 dollars next year that the football team raised for kidney cancer.

Football is more than just a game here at Penn State; but it is not the villain.

–Tricia T., Penn State junior and lifelong State College resident

I was born and grew up here in State College. I went to school with the Paterno kids and graduated from State High with the oldest daughter. I also graduated with one of the Sandusky's adopted sons.

Joe Paterno did a lot of good for the university and this community. He was more than just a coach but he was not a saint. He was just a man. I belive that if he knew anything about what Sandusky was doing (per the Freeh report) it was just speculation or rumor and you can't fire a person or call the police with that. When McQueary told Joe about what he saw, Joe told his bosses. He didn't hush it up. He didn't call the police either. How do you call the police and tell them about a crime that you didn't witness? That was 28 year old McQueary's job. Maybe Joe should have told McQueary to call but my belief is that Joe couldn't believe what was being told to him. From what I understand, pedofiles groom not only their victims but the parents and anyone else that may find out the truth. Until this past year Sandusky was an upstanding member of the community who was "supposedly" helping young boys with his charity, the Second Mile. He had the community fooled. Was Joe fooled as well? He was just a man.

The community will get through this. My thoughts are with the victims AND the Paterno family. The media needs to understand that Sandusky is the criminal and he is now convicted, in prison and awaiting sentencing. They can now leave us to make the changes we need to make and let our community start healing.

–Bob E., lifelong State College resident and father of two current Penn State students

Personally, I think this entire thing circulates around people wanting to be superior. And I'm kind of sick of people using this to feel better about themselves, as if they WERE in Joe Paterno's position, and they actually CHOSE to do something different. Because now, when I defend the school that I love, its like i'm a supporter of child abuse. The students are caught in this, and we are all going to have to carry the weight of this university's mistakes on our shoulders. When we are really the last people to have done anything about all of this. Of course I'm proud of my school, of course I'm going to defend it. Joe Paterno made things possible for my friends and fellow students in an academic sense, he changed this university for the better. I wouldn't have what I have to do in many cases if it weren't for him.

For me its not about football, and it never was about football. That's really what I've been having trouble communicating to people. Joe wasn't the only one fooled by Jerry Sandusky, all of the failed investigations, the counselors in schools, we all were fooled. And I'm feeling pretty fooled right now, and disappointed. In most cases Joe was an exemplary citizen of centre county. its too hard for me to forget about those things, but its not as if I'm not mad at him.

Mostly, I just feel personally targeted by the media, and this crazy expectation that Paterno's family should turn its back on him, as if someone could do that to their father. It's very unfortunate that most of what I have worked for and what thousands of other students have worked for will be completely undermined by this.

Also, I'd like people to know just how deeply this affects us. I'm near tears almost every day about this. Not a day has gone by since that day in November that I haven't thought about it. The students ARE hurt, deeply, and no one really seems to want to give us any hugs.

–Emma G., junior at Penn State Schreyer Honors College, member of the Morale Committe for THON, fundraiser for THON, and lifelong State College resident

He made his bed and now has to sleep in it, but something made me sad that Sandusky will live the rest of his life in jail. I can't believe that all this could have happened over 15 years and nothing came of it until now. All that pain built up over that much time has exploded into something that no one connected to this town can't feel. I feel bad that Sandusky made the decisions he did to be in the situation he's in, I feel bad that because of this he will suffer until the end, but I feel worst for the children and men who Sandusky abused. Justice was served yesterday, but that doesn't take away their pain. I mourn for the beautiful people who are affected by people like Sandusky and I hope that healing will come to them.

–Ashley E., Penn State senior and lifelong State College resident

Paterno for me is a life long legacy of a cohesive group of academics and atheletics at a very large university. I continue to support him because he bestowed upon the university hopes, dreams, and gave us keys to knowledge that will last forever. I personally just don't see it wise to condemn a man for another man's actions, especially when the man himself has made numerous contributions financially and emotionally to the organization as a whole.

–Colton P., senior at Penn State

Although we may have been let down, we can’t forget what “The Paterno Way” stood for when it was still pristine in the eyes of the world – excellence in the classroom, honorable ethics, and a simplistic, selfless, and all-business approach to being successful at the task at hand. We don’t need Joe Paterno to exemplify those ideals – we are perfectly capable of exemplifying them ourselves. I hope those principles continue to live on as fundamental Penn State ideals.

–Ian K., Penn State senior and drummer in the Penn State Blue Band

A poem that was posted on the Penn State Memes Facebook page. Unfortunately I don't know who the author is.

Every Penn Stater down in Happy Valley, the tall and the small,
Was cheering! Without any program at all!
He HADN'T stopped the love of our University from coming! IT CAME!
Somehow or other, it came just the same!

And Dr. Emmert, with his Grinch-feet ice-cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling:
How could it be so?
It came without JoePa! It came without goals!
It came without scholarships, statues or bowls!

And he puzzled and puzzled, till his puzzler was sore.
Then Dr. Emmert thought of something he hadn't before!
"Maybe Penn State," he thought, "isn't just a football store.
Maybe Penn State… perhaps… means a little bit more."

For more information:

• The Kickstarter page for No Act of Ours, a 2013 documentary on the Penn State community's reactions to and relationship with the scandal—in particular, the trailer, which starts at 2:22 in the video at the top of the page
• "Jay Paterno eulogizes his father," Penn State College of Communications (video)
• Grand Jury report (graphic)
• Report by Louis Freeh, former director of the FBI—in particular, the timeline on page 19 of the report
• Former Penn State President Graham Spanier's letter to the Board of Trustees, which challenges conclusions in the Freeh report
• A letter from Joe Paterno written shortly before he died
• Penn State’s Facebook page
• The Facebook page of Onward State, "a student-run, independent Penn State blog"
• "The woman who stood up to Joe Paterno," CNN, and student response through Onward State
• "Airborne banner: Take down Paterno statue," CNN
• "NCAA Announces PSU Sanctions: $60M, bowl ban", ESPN
• "40 Reasons to Still be a Proud Penn Stater," by Onward State
• "Changing Campus Culture Beyond Penn State," Huffington Post

On the evening of June 6, 2012, a satellite with its camera pointed toward the sun sent the first 500 GB of its daily report back to base. Clouds covered the world thousands of miles below, where two summer interns were supposed to be observing the century's last transit of Venus through its eyes. Their display showed an uninterrupted sphere of flames.

One squinted at the screen. “Shouldn’t we see it already? When was it supposed to start?”

“Half an hour ago,” said the other.

They stared at the screen for another minute.

“Good grief,” said the first, “and I wanted to run for president someday. What’ll happen to us if all our calculations were wrong, and there isn’t a transit today at all?”

The second scowled at him. “Our calculations aren’t wrong,” he said. “The transit of Venus is a fairly predictable thing.” He paused, switching the settings on the screen. “Listen,” he said, “I don't know what's going on, but we’ll upload the footage from 2004. We’ll reconstruct it from several wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light and a portion of the visible spectrum. It’ll look different. No one will notice.”

The first shifted his weight in his seat and smiled uncomfortably. “You really don’t think anyone will notice?” he said.

“Of course not,” said the second.

And almost no one did.

Most of the world was overcast, but somewhere in the Pacific Ocean a cruise ship floated under one of the few patches of clear sky. A couple leaned over the railing on the deck, squinting at the setting sun through cardboard eclipse glasses.

“Is that it?”

“No, honey, that’s a bug. It should be on the top right.”

“I don’t see it. All I see is the sun. Do you see it?”

“No, honey, I don’t see it.”

“Is that it?”

“No, honey, that’s another bug.”

And so on, until the red, uneclipsed sun disappeared over the horizon.

A month later, almost all of Boston descended on the Longfellow and Harvard bridges and, in boats and on the bank, the stretch of the Charles River that connected them. A warm, thick breeze reflected off the clouds and the water. The crowd gathered in the growing darkness, interrupted by the lights of Boston and the red lightning in the distance.

The Longfellow bridge was evacuated. A patrol boat crisscrossed from one bank to the other, warning kayakers to stay out of the coming storm: "Please find shelter,” he said. “The thunderstorm contains“—he paused— “lightning."

The fireworks started, finally, to cheers from the crowd and a rumbling that didn’t quite sound like thunder or fireworks. Minutes later the storm started as well, pummeling the river through the fireworks. The crowd bent away from the wind and water blowing off the river. The rain pummeled their backs while they squinted at the booming fireworks behind them.

Finally the rain stopped. The lights on both sides of the river vanished, block by block, until the river and the crowd were lit only by the fireworks. The ground rumbled again, louder this time. A few minutes later the last firework folded into the water, leaving the Charles River and the crowd in silence and darkness. Now unmistakable, a deep, munching sound echoed against the buildings on either side of the river....

Almost all of that is actually true, except for the mysterious power outage and the mysterious munching and the mysterious disappearance of Venus. Summer has so far been a mix of foreboding clouds and heat. The photos below are from the Boston side of the river before a thunderstorm. Most of campus is to the left of the frame; you can see the Green Building on the left edge. The photos above are from the Cambridge side of the river before the fireworks, also before a thunderstorm. (Click for larger versions.) Ominous weather is my favorite kind of weather.  =)

My UROP is actually as exciting and mysterious as I tried to make the rest of this blog post. And it’s real! I’m working on a low cost, high-risk project in the same lab I’ve been in for the past year. It’s extremely unlikely to succeed, but it’ll be darn awesome if it does. Every day is completely uncharted territory, with rapids at every turn. At the moment things seem to be going very well, but I might change my mind by the end of the day.

Since it’s far behind me, I’m now going to share a big secret about my past year at MIT: it hasn’t all been fun. The past two semesters have been tough, academically and otherwise. When I was applying to MIT, I coped with the potential for low grades and low self-esteem by telling myself that I wanted MIT to take me apart and make me better. The past year has without a doubt been a taking apart, culminating in ripping apart and eating bags of black tea at my final exams. For about a month after finals I kept having weird nightmares where our transcripts were tattooed into our backs at the end of every term and I didn't want to go out in a swimsuit. Now is hopefully the rebuilding. Here are some things I've learned:

• I’ve learned that some experiences are worth having, even if (especially if?) you know they’ll hurt. Stories aren’t interesting if nothing bad happens.
• I’ve learned that big, exciting things happen in small, not always exciting steps.
• I’ve learned that money has the power to dissolve friendships.
• I've learned that you can’t get everyone to like you. There is absolutely no point in not being yourself if that’s what it takes to try. There are a select few who will love you even when you spend a week pretending to be a tomato. Hold on to those.
• I’ve learned that stupidity and evil can be hard to distinguish, especially at the thick intersection of software and money.
• I’ve learned that success is transient and haphazard and does not emulate its keepers. Hard work doesn’t always pay off. The good guys don't always win.
• I've learned that the things worth trying are those you won't regret experiencing if they don't work.
• I’ve reevaluated what I look for in friends and in myself. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that in all situations, kind and good are more important to me than intelligent or likely to succeed.
• I've learned that friends and family are much, much more important to me than grades or money.
• I’ve learned that my own awareness of my aptitude can be more limiting than my actual abilities. Just as excessive self-confidence can limit your worldview and put incompetent people in important positions, too little can choke the abilities that you decided you don’t have. It's a tricky balance.
• Perhaps most importantly, I’ve learned that the people we think are unattainably great never had to earn a special license to fill that role. There is no threshold of age or coolness after which you are suddenly authorized to do big things. This epiphany is especially relevant to those of you who are in high school. Want something? Go get it. You don’t need an MIT education to start doing amazing, world-changing things, especially if you take advantage of the Internet.

Did you know that lightning makes raindrops bigger? This summer I’m also lightly studying for next semester and mentally preparing for the next two years. I’m going to have to kick it up a few notches, and I’ll have to grapple for those notches as I go. Like I said, ominous weather is my favorite kind of weather. Bring it on, Dark and Mysterious Future.

5-room, large half:

My home for the past three semesters has been 335, the wonderful lounge-side 5-room on the 290-side third floor. My door opens up to the hallway connecting my floor’s lounge to the back of the building, making it visible from the third-floor portal to the 282 side of the building. If my door is open I have a strategic view of the most popular intersection in the dorm. If my door is closed my room is as quiet as the rest of the back of the building.

335 was initially painted a beautiful light purple that glowed orange in the sun. Unfortunately the paint was old and cracked and had handprints suspiciously close to the ceiling. Before my sophomore year I finally painted it the three shades of green you can see below, supplied by Random Hall for free:

Below are some of my favorite things in my room. On the left wall above (click for a larger view) and on the upper left below is the painting my amazing then-eight-year-old brother gave me when I left for MIT. On the wall above my bed is possibly my favorite photo ever, taken in Israel by a family friend. The glass of the frame broke on the flight home. The fake wooden board behind it was the back of a shelving unit I brought with me to MIT but never actually attached, despite everyone’s insistence that I had doomed the shelving unit to collapse. Probably as a result, the top half of the shelving unit did collapse partway through my first semester. The bottom half survived in my closet until I got annoyed at the exposed screws; I’m not sure if I got rid of it then or if it finally buckled. When I moved into my current room I nailed the cardboard to the wall. (I'd like to pretend it was symbollic but it wasn't; the wall just felt empty.)

Hippie the hippo was given to me by my mom’s boss’s wife when we first moved to Chicago 16 years ago. The giant turtle was from the same era, and the stuffed cat was a Christmas present that cost around $20, which at the time was a lot of money. The lion and the beaver are more recent: I got the lion overpriced at a zoo giftshop because I really, really wanted him, and the beaver was my personal prize for getting into MIT.

I made you an ominous video of Hephaestus eating, set to Clint Mansell’s “Lux Aeterna,” the most ominous music I could find:

5-room, small “half”:

If you look back at my current room you might notice a dark green doorway just visible above the shelves on the right wall. This door leads to 335s, the room I lived in during my first semester (the same door is on the left in the photo below):

335s is 335’s small half, though it is only a half to the extent that one third is a half. The small half is about half the size of the large half, just wide enough to fit a bed. Living in a small half is a good lesson in keeping your floor as clean as possible and taking advantage of vertical space. It can be a pleasant, cozy room if organized well. Like the large half it faces the alleyway, which means it is relatively quiet and gets a lot of light. Unlike the large half it has a closet, which is ironic.

Small halves are usually freshman rooms. Though they are small, they are practically singles: they are considered doubles only because of the door and the ease of listening in on the large half’s occupant. An even better perk is that the resident of the small half inherits the large half as soon as it is empty.

You can barely see it in this photo, but this room is painted three shades of yellow. My close friend Dana ‘14 painted it to match my green stripes when she lived in it last fall. It is currently vacant, which means that one of you will probably live in it next term.

2-room:

The 2-room is the only real double in Random Hall and the other usually freshman room. 2-rooms have doors facing lounges or kitchens and windows facing Massachusetts Avenue, which makes them noisier than most other rooms but also makes it much easier to socialize, since you don't even have to leave your room to see people. This particular room is 342, which opens up into the kitchen of my floor.

1-room:

1-rooms are singles adjacent to 2-rooms. Like 2-rooms, 1-rooms have doors facing lounges or kitchens and windows facing Massachusetts Avenue, making them noisy and social. 1-rooms have one window, which is larger than other rooms’ windows. This is 221, a lounge-facing 2-room on the second floor with what I think is the coolest paint job in the dorm. It belonged to Rebecca ‘12 last year and is now Ellen ‘14’s.

3-room:

3-rooms have two windows looking out into the shaft. Lounge-side 3-rooms have large walk-in closets, which some of my friends have used as separate study rooms, while kitchen-side 3-rooms do not. This is 423, a lounge-side 3-room that belongs to Mika ‘14 during term and is Ceres ‘14’s for the summer.

4-room:

4-rooms are divided into two halves separated by arches. The first half has a door to the hallway. The second half has a window looking out into the shaft.

This is Cory ‘13’s room. I painted the walls grey and navy blue over the past month. They were originally blank Institute white, which can drive a person crazy. Above is the first half of the room, viewed from the door. Below is the second half, with the arches on the left.

My favorite part of Cory’s room is without a doubt his plushies. The story goes that Mustache Bunny Theodore, wanting a big, strong son, mated with a cow, a tiger, and a zebra to produce Montgomery, Winston, and Claudius, respectively, pictured below. After three attempts produced striped or spotted mustached rabbits of normal rabbit size, Mustache Bunny adopted Buffalo, who will presumably grow up to be buffalo sized. Here they are shown as I found them when I walked in last Thursday. I don’t know what plots they concoct when we’re not there, but they must be important.

Hopefully this has been helpful to those of you who might want to live here. Please comment if you have questions about rooms or housing, or if you find out in two weeks that you've been placed in Random Hall. =)

The school you choose in the next few days is one of your first big decisions. Some very intelligent people have disagreed with my decision-making process, but I stand by it: follow your heart, as cheesy as it sounds. When it comes to some of your biggest, most consequential life decisions—your priorities, your career path, or, in this blog post, your home for the next four years—it seems to me that what you choose is a lot less important than that you are confident in your decision and prepared to give yourself to it fully. I think where you end up is less important than that you choose it for yourself and that you choose it for reasons you believe in. You’ll be here for the next four (or three or five) years, wherever here is. That’s not very long. It’s going to be as important, as fun, and as life-changing as you make it.

Two years ago I got into MIT and Caltech. I also spent my senior year of high school at the Penn State Schreyer Honors College as an early enrollment student, and had the option of staying.

I should have visited Caltech, but I didn't want to pay for or sit through the flight from Pennsylvania. I realized it wouldn’t be any different if I went to school there, and I decided I couldn’t live that far away from my family for four years.

At Penn State I was at least a year younger than everyone in my classes, and thanks to AP credits I could graduate in two and a half years if I wanted to (including what would have been 12th grade). I was already doing research in the field I want to dedicate the rest of my life to. My professors were extremely accessible and usually thrilled that an undergrad wanted to talk with them. Dr. Ocneanu, who is still one of my favorite professors, chatted with me about math and life for hours after lecture several days a week.

I left because if I stayed, the next few years would probably be just like the one before it.

I lived at home. I had lunch with my mom every day, and I could visit my parents (both are professors) whenever I wanted. I hitched a ride with my parents or biked to class in the morning, always surrounded by forest and mountains.

Good grades came easily, but my classes weren't much harder or more interesting than they were in high school. I was younger than everyone around me. I didn't relate to the predominant culture of the university, and I made no effort to absorb it. I didn’t make many new friends, and the friends I did have were friends from high school or my mom’s students. I don't think I changed or grew much in that year, compared to my years at MIT.

MIT shapes you. It pushes you to your limits, redefines your limits, pushes you some more, breaks you down, and rebuilds you as a better person and a better scientist. It gives you opportunities to explore and amazing friends to explore them with.

I knew this before coming to MIT, and it was my answer to the big “Why MIT?” question. But I didn’t really know what it meant.

MIT is MIT entirely because of the people here. For maybe the first time in your life, all of your peers will be as smart as or smarter than you, and just as willing to work hard. In high school, you might have been defined by your nerdiness and intelligence. When suddenly everyone around you is just as nerdy and just as intelligent, you start to discover new layers of your personality and your relationships with other people. You stop defining yourself by your grades and start to strive to be a better, more interesting person in other ways.

Another result of smart peers is that your professors will have very high expectations. An obvious effect is hard, fast-paced classes: not only will you learn the material in your classes, but you will also learn how to manage your time, how to study efficiently, and how to use your resources (including asking for help). Another effect is that the intelligent, accomplished adults you interact with will value your ideas and your dreams for humanity, and that you are likely to be trusted with important, challenging problems if you decide to work in a lab.

Maybe the most important thing you will learn at MIT is how to handle failure in a constructive way. You will learn just how big a role luck plays in success, and you will learn the importance of hard work, persistence, and good friends. You will push what you thought your limits were, reassess your priorities, and learn how to stay happy when things don’t consistently work out. MIT makes you resilient; it teaches you how to accurately assess obstacles, and it gives you the confidence to take risks.

A lot of MIT is fun and games, but MIT is not easy and it is not always fun. However, the people you will meet here and the person you will become—and every step in the transformation—are more than worth it.

I hope you choose MIT, obviously. This place is amazing. If you got in, it’s because you can handle it, and because you’re the kind of person who might love it. Life moves fast here: there are many more opportunities—for fun, for work, or both—than you have time for, even if you don’t sleep. But whether you choose MIT or not, own your decision, because when the path you choose gets difficult, it will be very helpful to rekindle the assurance and sense of purpose that drove you to follow it. Do it because you know you want to do it, not because of money or rankings or because other people say you should.

Please email me or comment if you have questions about MIT, or if a blog post about a particular topic could help you with your decision. Alternatively, check out the annual questions thread on College Confidential.

Congratulations on your acceptance(s). Best of luck choosing. :)

I experienced my CPW, two years ago, through a downpour. I was temped at MacGregor, which had a beautiful view of the rain pummeling the Charles River and Boston on the other bank, pictured above. It was windy. I was cold. My raincoat was useless. My umbrella was useless. I concluded from my puny sample size of four days that MIT’s legendary firehose was actually somewhere in the sky, and when I got home I invested in a big, dark green, double-canopy umbrella. It was, according to Amazon, the BMW of umbrellas.

I spent most of my CPW at East Campus, because I was convinced I would live there (I don’t). I gawked at nerdy shirts at the COOP, which I would buy a year later as post-exam consolation presents. I got a campus tour from a girl with green hair, who is now a close friend. I built things. I climbed things. I participated in a protest. I met amazing people. I rocked out to amazing music. I ate free food. I got Chris M. to autograph my arm:

Your CPW will be less rainy, but I promise you it will be just as awesome. Here’s a preview, from two years ago:

Things to bring

1. Your cell phone.
2. Your cell phone charger.
3. A digital camera.
4. A flashlight.
5. An umbrella.
6. Something warm that you can put on when it's cold and take off five minutes later when it's not cold, like an MIT hoodie.
7. A highlighter, so you can highlight all the events with free food you want to go to in your CPW booklet.
8. A sleeping bag, and a willingness to sleep in things that are not beds.
9. Not homework. I brought my homework. Don’t bring your homework. If you're doing homework over CPW, you’re doing CPW wrong.
10. Not food. You’ll get a card with about $20 on it for food. If you actually need any of it, you are again doing it wrong. Let us feed you. I spent almost all my $20.14 on orange chocolate at La Verde’s on the last day of CPW. I encourage you to do the same. Mmmm chocolate.

PooF To GO TO (Points for the Good of the Order)

When it comes to dorm events, pay more attention to the people than the event. Your goal over CPW is to meet everybody. EVERYBODY. You will not reach this goal, but I want to see you try. Visit every dorm at least once. If you stop by Random Hall (and I happen to be home, and you recognize me) I’ll give you a glitter fairy sticker and a sheet of bubble wrap.

Please don't be shy. You’re an excited prefrosh. The other prefrosh are also excited prefrosh. The upperclassmen are drained since last CPW, and need your excitement to revitalize them. Don’t you dare contain your excitement.

Here are two events you should definitely go to, because I'll be there and I say they'll be awesome:

The other events I think you should definitely go to are Random Hall events. Random Hall traditionally has more events than any other living group, despite being the smallest dorm. You might notice that most events start 17 minutes after the hour (or half hour). That's because 17 is the most random number, according to random people polled by Randommites outside of Random Hall. Coincidentally, 17 also happens to be the number of prefrosh living at Random for CPW. You might also notice that events continue until 30:00. That's because Random Hall runs on the more realistic Random Standard Time, where the day rolls over not at midnight, but at 6 am.

Finally, you might notice that the events below are not the same as the events in your official CPW schedule. That's because this list is more right than your list. You can get the better, updated list with event descriptions by stopping by Random Hall or, later today, by clicking here.

Y is a third-year undergraduate student at MIT, a math major and one of only five current MIT undergraduate students from the United Kingdom. To have gotten to MIT she had to face not only the 3.7% international admit rate, but also dyslexia, a learning disorder that prevents her from reading and writing as quickly and effectively as most of her peers.

A short paragraph can take Y half an hour to type. She says that the words that come out on paper or on the screen do not match up with what she envisions in her mind. It takes her more time to read and write than other students, and she has to spend extra time on problem sets and essays.

Like many successful people with dyslexia, Y sees her difficulty reading and writing as something to conquer. She has taken on a concentration in writing, which requires her to take extra writing classes in her time at MIT, and she volunteers for leadership positions in her dorm that involve regularly emailing the entire building. After graduating she hopes to return to the United Kingdom for graduate school.

The ability to read has long been linked in society’s mind to intelligence, but dyslexia is surprisingly common at MIT, to such an extent that the founder of the MIT Media Lab and the One Laptop per Child Association, Nicholas Negroponte (a dyslexic himself), called it the MIT disease in his autobiography. Recent research has found that dyslexia is not related to IQ. It is, however, the most common learning disability, at MIT and elsewhere, affecting between 5% and 20% of the population.

The latest research is finding dyslexia’s roots in unexpected places, with unexpected consequences, disproving common misconceptions about dyslexia and learning disorders in general. We are beginning to find that dyslexia is not a disorder but a different way of experiencing and understanding the world around us, created by a different wiring and development of the brain with benefits as significant as its downsides.

Dyslexia Research

A popular misconception is that people with dyslexia rotate, switch, and mirror letters as they read and write, but while many people with dyslexia do indeed confuse the direction and sequence of letters, dyslexia stems from difficulty processing the auditory, not visual, information of language. It is currently believed that dyslexia is caused by difficulty connecting letters to their associated sounds, and that these phonological difficulties stem from structural differences in the brain.

Y, for example, connects sounds to colors, rather than symbols. Imagining a sound brings to mind not the letter, but a color. Each sound has its own color: the calming light blue she painted her dorm room is the long e.

Tyler Perrachione, a dyslexia researcher at MIT, explains that all children flip and switch letters as they first learn to read, and that the difficulty is not specific to people with dyslexia. “In life, you want to be insensitive to the orientation of objects,” he says. “Orthography is set apart from other visual stimuli. They [children] have to learn that letters are special.” In languages where symbols represent concepts rather than sounds, such as Chinese, a larger number of dyslexics do suffer from a visual deficit. But even in China, says Perrachione, visual deficits are always present in combination with a phonological deficit, never in isolation.

Tyler Perrachione became interested in speech-sound learning as an undergraduate student, and is now studying dyslexia as a Ph.D. candidate at the Gabrieli lab at MIT. He describes studying language as “learning about what makes us human, and what makes our brains unique: moving ideas from my head to your head. I was hooked. Language was cool.”

Perrachione’s most recent publication focuses on how people with dyslexia process auditory language. He explains that while speakers of a language may use the same words, pronunciation of those words is unique to the individual. We use these nuances in pronunciation to distinguish between voices. Perrachione found that people with dyslexia have trouble with voice recognition in their native language. Previous studies have found that people with dyslexia have difficulty following a single voice in a crowd, such as the voice of a professor in a noisy lecture hall.

As babies we are sensitive to all variability in speech sounds, explains Perrachione. As we grow up we lose sensitivity to those nuances that are not in our native language. “The brain is so good at handling all the variability that there is in speech,” he says, “but it comes with a cost. Being very good at mapping sounds to the representations that you do have comes with the cost of not being able to perceive sounds in other languages.”

We don’t consciously notice the variability in language, but the brain does not ignore it, says Perrachione. “The brain can keep track of who is saying what, and how they sound is the cue to who they are.” Knowing a language gives us a standard against which to compare what we hear, he says: “Being able to say people sound different requires having some sort of comparison.” People with dyslexia do not have this comparison: “The variability is not informative, because you don’t have a standard to compare it to.”

In Perrachione’s experiment, normal readers had improved voice recognition abilities in their native languages. People with dyslexia, on the other hand, had no more accuracy than in foreign languages, where the nuances in sound were unfamiliar. “When you take language out of the equation they’re just as good. When you put language back in, they’re no better.”

The differences between how people with dyslexia and normal readers process language are evident in the anatomy of the brain. In both cases, the left hemisphere of the brain contains centers for speech, reading, and language processing. The connective fiber attaching the hearing centers in the temporal lobe with the parietal lobe becomes denser as a person’s ability to hear and identify small units of sound—as well as the ability to read—improves. This area of the brain, located toward the back of the head, is responsible for decoding letters and written words into their corresponding sounds; anatomical studies have found that dyslexics have decreased nerve cell matter and often decreased connective fiber in this area compared to normal readers.

The right hemisphere of the brain—specifically, the right prefrontal cortex, which is located at the front of the head—produces visual images. Individuals without dyslexia suppress the visual areas of the right hemisphere while reading, as originally hypothesized in 1925 and confirmed in 2003 by researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center. Normal readers use the right prefrontal cortex less and less as they learn to read fluently and shift from reading by memorizing words to reading by translating letters into sounds. Perrachione’s advisor John Gabrieli at MIT and Fumiko Hoeft of the Stanford University School of Medicine have found that the quarter to half of dyslexic children who learn to compensate for their dyslexia read by memorizing words through visual memory, increasing the activity and development of the right prefrontal cortex. In normal readers, the left side of the brain is often larger than the right. In dyslexic readers the two hemispheres are usually of equal size, or the right hemisphere is larger.

Manuel Casanova at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, has found that dyslexics also tend to have less tightly packed neurons that make more far-reaching connections. Casanova found that neurons vary from tightly packed, encouraging connections with nearby neurons, to more spread out, providing space for more distant connections. At the former extreme, neurons make more of their connections with nearby neurons and can process information very quickly. The resulting person is often highly specialized and detail-oriented, and can be autistic. At the other extreme, neurons make more of their connections with distant parts of the brain, supporting complex comparisons and mental simulations. This end of the spectrum has high incidence of dyslexia.

Perrachione warns, however, that studies linking differences in the anatomy of the brain to differences in behavior are rarely replicated and often don’t stand up to scientific scrutiny, and should therefore be viewed with some amount of skepticism. “Excluding injury in adult life,” he says, “very big changes in behavior are almost never explained by big changes in brain architecture.”

Living with Dyslexia

There is hope for treating dyslexia at an early age. In 2008, Nadine Gaab at the Children’s Hospital Boston found that rapid sound shifts in spoken language generated activity in areas of the brain associated with sound recognition in normal 10-year-olds, but elicited no activity from children with dyslexia. After two months of exercising these areas of the brain, however, the dyslexic children were able to match the normal children in listening comprehension, and also had improved reading comprehension.

Dyslexia often goes undiagnosed until college or graduate school, when the length and difficulty of assigned readings make it difficult to compensate with sheer intelligence. If diagnosed as an undergraduate, an MIT student would be referred to student support services, to disability services, and then to a neuropsychologist for testing. MIT has services in place to help students with dyslexia, including exams and textbooks on tape, readers, scribes, a computer lab with voice recognition and scan-and-read software, and the option to take exams in a reduced distraction setting or with extended time.

Dr. Xiaolu His, a psychologist at MIT Mental Health and Counseling, says that many people with dyslexia find life much easier after entering the workforce, where tasks become less time-sensitive and being able to read and write quickly becomes less important. Instead, creativity and flexible thinking become vital, and people with dyslexia who are able to get so far often excel. She encourages students with dyslexia to get the help they need. “Once the problem is identified, you will find your solution,” says His. “It does not have to cripple you for life.”

Benefits of Dyslexia

“Everything that happens has a silver lining,” says Perrachione. Dyslexia’s is often a predisposition for creativity and big-picture thinking. “Their ways of thinking can be extremely useful,” says His of her dyslexic patients. “Some of them are just among the most creative, exciting innovating people I've ever met.”

Many people with dyslexia go into comedy, says Perrachione, citing Jay Leno and writers for the Saturday Night Live comedy show. A recent study also found that astronomers with dyslexia are better at identifying black holes: people with dyslexia have enhanced peripheral vision, improved pattern recognition abilities, and, says Perrachione, more creativity and flexibility in their thinking.

According to Brook and Fernette Eide, authors of The Dyslexic Advantage, the cognitive flexibility associated with dyslexia can manifest itself in noteworthy talents. “Dyslexic brains are organized in a way that maximizes strength in making big picture connections at the expense of weaknesses in processing fine details,” says Fernette Eide. These talents include improved spatial reasoning, enhanced ability to view events from multiple perspectives and draw analogies, and a tendency to remember facts as experiences and stories rather than as abstractions. Individuals with dyslexia often excel in careers that involve telling and understanding stories, making predictions or decisions using incomplete or rapidly changing information, and crossing boundaries between disciplines and ways of thinking. “High-performing dyslexics are very intelligent, often out-of-the box thinkers and problem-solvers,” says Bennet A. Shaywitz, co-director of the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity.

It is important for us to stop seeing dyslexia as a learning disability and start seeing it as an alternative way of perceiving and processing the world, with benefits as well as drawbacks, and with the potential to contribute creative approaches to our world’s problems. We have only just begun unraveling the secrets of the dyslexic mind. We know now that phonological impairment leads to dyslexia. The next step, says Perrachione, is to figure out how. Current research in the Gabrielli lab is focusing on measuring brain plasticity and responsiveness to changes in sound. The data will be out soon, says Perrachione, after it goes through peer review. “I think they [the data] have a lot of promise for really revolutionizing how we talk about the phonological deficit in dyslexia,” he says. “They’re very exciting. You can expect to see new discoveries soon.”

Getting Home

Instead of flying, my boyfriend Cory and I took a bus from Boston to New York City and another bus from New York to Pennsylvania to visit my family. After we got off the first bus we wandered around a few blocks of New York City for twenty minutes and then arrived at the next bus stop.

“There’s our bus.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Nope.”

It was a large white van with A One Bus Inc written on the side, along with its capacity, 18. The driver sat us in the back, and fit more people into the van as they showed up. Eventually the van was full. A girl came up to the driver, asking to pay in cash for a seat. The driver reached under a seat in the second-to-last row and, like magic, out came a ninteenth seat, without a back or a seatbelt, filling up the aisle. The girl grasped two other seats and sat down on the new low seat.

Then a boy came over, also with cash. The driver put his guitar in the trunk. We heard metal clanking and we laughed, wondering if he’d conjure up another seat in the trunk and the boy would ride with our luggage. But no! Out came a preschool-sized folding chair (“Does that have a seatbelt?”) which he fit in the aisle in front of the first fold-out seat.

Here’s the view from my seat in the last row, and then some of us in front of the bus outside a gas station. The folding chair appears outside the bus on the right and under the man in the orange hoodie on the left.

In the end there were two of us in the first row, including the driver, three in each of the next two rows, four in the fourth row, including the folding chair, four in the fifth row, including the fold-out seat, and four in the back row, including me and Cory. It was stuffy, hot, and too cramped for elbow space. It was extra sweet when we started passing rivers and forests, the mountains began to part for towns ending in ville and burg, and I could count down the miles to home.

I live in State College, PA, which makes up the bulk of Happy Valley, part of which is called Pleasant Gap. The town revolves around Penn State, is surrounded by farms, and is said to be growing into a small city. Purple mountains shelter us on all sides (from cell phone signal, sometimes), much like the university shields us from the recession and a sea of red shelters our tiny blue dot come November. There is almost no crime, everything is 15 minutes away, and the grass seems to stay green year round. The place radiates energy and optimism.

Coming home, for me, is hiking, canoeing, and then a warm, soft bed, a quiet night, and waking up to birds singing and the rain bubbling on the sidewalk. My family is like my battery: seeing them leaves me enthusiastic about my classes and the people around me and optimistic about the future. I spent spring break recharging with my parents, hiking some favorite paths, getting a lot of sleep and amazing food, and playing monopoly and stuffed animals with my brother and my boyfriend. Here are two highlights: a momentous bubble bath and some amazing people on the Colbert Report.

The Bubble Bath

The day after I got home my bother achieved every child’s greatest fantasy. After our second day hiking in the rain he immediately ran upstairs to take a hot bath. Half an hour later there were bubbles filling the bathtub, bubbles climbing up the walls, and bubbles knee-high on the floor. You know you’re jealous. Here’s what it looked like after the first round of clean-up:

Cleaning up was incredibly fun, like living a childish yet intellectually stimulating dream. We quickly discovered that trying to squash the bubbles only created more bubbles. Cory drained and refilled the bathtub to slowly lower the concentration of soap until there were no more bubbles. Meanwhile I took care of the floor and the walls. The culprit, in case anyone wants to replicate our experiment, was “just a few drops” of Tone Tahitian Vanilla and Orchid Body Wash.

The Colbert Report

I’ve been interested in sex determination and sex chromosome evolution since my senior year of high school, when I was lucky to be introduced to genomics by Dr. Kateryna Makova. After a year in the Makova lab at Penn State I returned to the same field at MIT, where I’ve been working as a UROP at the Page lab. On March 26th, our PI, Dr. David Page, appeared on the Colbert Report to defend the honor of the Y chromosome.

The story starts hundreds of millions of years ago. The X and Y chromosomes originated as identical autosomes, non-sex chromosomes. After they split, the X chromosome continued evolving at about the same rate as other autosomes; the Y chromosome, on the other hand, began shrinking and losing genes. Some people speculated that the trend would continue, and that within 10 million years the Y chromosome would disappear completely. Would a new set of sex chromosomes replace the X and the Y? Would we split into new humanoid species? Would men disappear?

To settle the debate, the Page lab sequenced the Y chromosome of the rhesus monkey and compared it with ours, discovering that while the Y chromosome degenerated rapidly after its split with the X, it has been relatively stable since the human-rhesus split, 25 million years ago. Here is Dr. David Page explaining the conclusions on the Colbert Report:

For a more detailed account, read the full paper here.

On a related but less serious note, I found out this morning that the Tacocopter, invented by the super amazing MIT alum Star Simpson, along with Dustin Boyer and MIT alum Scott Torborg, also recently found its way to the Colbert Report. Check it out.

Other diversions this spring break included putting my phone through our washing machine’s 57-minute cold cycle (extra rinse, extra spin; it lives!); buying and planting a five-and-a-half-foot-tall heartthrob dogwood tree, which will bloom in June, for my mom’s birthday, which will happen in April; and running every evening with my dad, who runs five to ten kilometers every day, barefoot, rain or shine, in temperatures above 27 degrees Fahrenheit. I learned how to spell cumulonimbus, in preparation for my brother’s spelling test, and I learned how to cook things that are not cereal, in preparation for surviving the rest of this semester.

As always, it was good to be home.

And then I did.

MIT is wonderful, but as Folkers Rojas, former MIT undergradate and current MIT graduate student, wrote in the Tech last month, the magic didn’t happen. MIT is not a magic wonderland. There are grades. There’s a lot of work. There are times when you are happy, and then there are times when your preexisting uncertainties are magnified and your self-esteem drops to unprecedented lows.

I applied early action, and on decision date I finally got deferred. I remember very clearly what it felt like. I cried. I ate an entire box of mandarin oranges. I arranged the College Confidential results threads from the past n years into an Excel document, and I tried for several hours to determine which variables could best predict my chances for March. I’m going to tell you now what I wish someone had told me then.

You applied because you’re passionate about something, probably science or technology, maybe writing or music or theater. You’ve found something you love. You’ve nerded out on it. You want to keep doing it for the next four years. In fact, you want to keep doing it forever. You know that it’s awesome, and you know that together, it and you can make the world a better place.

An inspirational image from the Internet.

Applying to MIT has a parallel in science: not all projects turn out, and not all grants get accepted. In order to succeed you need to invest yourself in something that probably won’t work out, and if it does work out, it will take years of love and dedication and commitment. If you go to MIT you’ll experience this. If you continue in science, engineering, business, or anything, really, you will experience this even more. Failure is inherent in risk, and risk is necessary for success.

Applying to MIT was a great risk, with a very small chance of positive outcome. You’ve already given your all, for almost two decades, to get where you are now. I know you’ve put in a lot.

Here is my deep life advice, for the next week and forever after. Going places and reaching your goals takes luck, skill, and perseverance. It depends more on you than on the school you go to. Keep the future in mind, but live in the present. Enjoy what you do and the people you are with. Take chances; be bold enough to put your all into everything you do. You’ll probably miss at least as often as you hit, but trying hard and trying often are more important than succeeding, since the positive impact of your successes will eventually far exceed your losses.

If you go to MIT, it will take you apart and put you back together again. It’s an opportunity that you can use to learn, grow, and get far. But an undergraduate education is only the first step. Regardless of whether or not you go to MIT, you have a long, uphill battle ahead of you. You’ve gotten far, and you’ll go farther. Your efforts will lead to a lot more than an admissions decision.

If you get in on Wednesday, congratulations. You’re about to start a long and challenging journey with many prizes along the way, if you choose to accept it. If you don’t get in on Wednesday, inhale, exhale, and move on without looking back. You’ll have plenty of other, greater successes to celebrate.

As hard as I know it is, try not to obsess over your pending decision. Do spend time with your family and friends, and revel in the last few months of your childhood before you have to buy your own groceries (the rest of us are jealous, really). Do the things you keep putting off.

Here are some (free) things on the Internet I enjoy now or enjoyed in high school, to de-stress and distract you:

• A City on the Edge of Forever: my favorite Star Trek episode; for you, hopefully a gateway to more Star Trek.
• PhD Comics: a lightly pessimistic web comic about life in academia.
• xkcd: a nerdy web comic that you've probably already heard of.
• Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: a Harry Potter fanfiction that is every bit as entertaining as it is rational.
• The Guild: a web series about online gamers.
• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja: I haven't read this web comic, but my boyfriend recommends it.
• Atlantic Monthly back issues, from 1995 to today: a glimpse of perspectives that exist, including some of my favorite fiction.
• Pushing Daisies: a TV series about Ned, a pie shop owner who can bring the dead back to life, his dead childhood sweetheart, and their adorable mystery-solving adventures.
• Veronica Mars: a TV series about Veronica Mars, a jaded high school student turned detective, and her mystery-solving adventures.
• Firefly: another TV series. This one's a western, set in 2517 on a spaceship.

Hopefully I’ll also be posting some math riddles this weekend, for those of you who enjoy that kind of thing. Have a good day. Be happy.
 

The first biochemistry recitation had a suspiciously young, suspiciously energetic recitation instructor, suspiciously asking the class to introduce itself and not talking about protein structure. Two course 18 freshmen later my heart sank. I couldn’t possibly hope that biochemistry was that trendy now. The class turned to me.

“Hi, I’m Lydia. I’m a sophomore. I’m in courses 6-7 and 18. I’m not in 7.05 recitation, am I?”

I found out later that we didn’t have recitation that week, which I didn’t realize because I accidentally pre-registered for 7.06 instead of 7.05. Oops.

I retreated with my freshly free hour and a bagel, orange juice, and large coffee from Café Four to my favorite empty classroom on campus, a small room in Building Four within hearing distance of the piano practice rooms, with big desks and a huge window looking out over Killian Court, to read The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster, an apocalyptic sci-fi that seemed way too awesome to be homework but, amazingly, was. By the end of the story I had inched halfway around the table to escape the sun, and considered that I should probably spend more time outside and less time creeping away from natural light.

Random Hall turned 11 last Wednesday, on Leap Day. I’m turning 20 in less than two weeks, which terrifies me because my last eight purchases have been Legos, mechanical pencils, and glitter fairy stickers to put on my problem sets. I’m trying to figure out if I can be a grownup and still like comic books. Life feels a little like this right now (mouse over):

I’m trying to take on an easier but busy schedule this term, to raise my GPA and self-confidence, start a good pattern of sleeping and exercising and eating vegetables, and set the stage for a positive next two years at MIT.

18.06: Linear Algebra

Since I decided to be a math major I need to take this. Why not now? I like it so far. It feels like it'll be very useful, whatever I end up doing with my life.

18.03: Differential Equations

I no-recorded differential equations spring semester freshman year. I’m impressed by how much my ability to work through both familiar and novel problems has improved over the past year at MIT. This class used to be hard; this time around it isn’t (fingers crossed).

I like my recitation instructor. He started the first recitation with a pep talk about responsibility and motivation. We should own our decision to take differential equations, he said, and own the material so we can use it to reach our greater goals. I wish someone had given me this pep talk a year ago, but I’m just as happy to hear it now.

6.006: Introduction to Algorithms

How to write good code, and then make it even better. About a tenth of Random Hall is currently taking or TA-ing 6.006. I love it. I learned more about programming from the first problem set than I ever expected to learn in two weeks. This class is a prerequisite for almost everything else I want to take. Hopefully it’s the first step to becoming a better programmer, so I can someday write efficient algorithms for genome analysis and help advance our understanding of who we are today and how we got here.

21L.448J, also known as 21W.739J: Darwin and Design

We read, think, talk, and write about evolution, religion, our relationship with machines, and the future of human (and/or robot) civilization. I love it. I can’t believe I’m getting credit for this.

7.05: General Biochemistry

I like the material so far. My parents both do research in biochemistry and molecular biology; it’s exciting to understand more about what they do every day. I’m happy that the problem sets are not graded, and that the grade breakpoints are set before the first exam. However, this is without a doubt my hardest class this term. The exams are open note. I’m terrified.

I also picked up two new jobs: in addition to my UROP and blogging I am now also a professional note taker and button pusher. I am a desk worker, which means I do problem sets on the first floor of my dorm, unlock the door for friends, and panic when facilities workers stop by (“Hi, I’m here about the leak.” “The water leak?” “The heat leak.” “The hot water leak?” “The heat leak.”) or the mail comes in. I am also a note taker in biochemistry, which is exactly what it sounds like.

And here we are. I’m starting the term off with five awesome classes, four hobby-jobs of varying intensity, and my first great expedition into existence as a two-decade-old. (And no spelling tests.)

Snively blogged about laptops almost four years ago, comparing the three laptops that MIT recommends: Macs, Dells, and Thinkpads. I’ve seen MIT students with all variety of these and more. I've had all three.

My first computer was an IBM Thinkpad T27 and my second computer was an IBM ThinkPad R31. ThinkPads are very durable. I’ve dropped them from desk height. I’ve dropped them from standing height. Once, I dropped the T27 onto a hardwood floor and its pieces flew across the room under different couches, as if to hide from me. I put them back where I thought they might belong and the computer worked as though nothing had happened. Magic.

My next computer was my dad’s old Dell, which ran Windows XP. The system gets slower with age, which seems like bad programming. I don't particularly like Windows. Unfortunately if you’re course 2 (Mechanical Engineering) you’ll need a Windows machine to run SolidWorks, a 3D mechanical design program.

My parents gave me my MacBook Pro as a gift before I left for MIT. It follows me everywhere. It’s pretty. It’s light. It might even be beautiful. My only qualm is that it occasionally gives me a kernel panic, and I desperately hope that if it dies, it dies before its warranty runs out. Other than that it’s great. I like being able to switch between the Unix terminal and the Apple GUI depending on what I need to do. I also like the trackpad, and I like that my computer does not become airborne every time I trip over the power cord.

I’m a klutz. It’s important to me that my computer not suffer on my behalf. Here are some things you should buy for your computer, once you buy your computer:

• A padded laptop bag with an extra division for your notebooks and things. I’ve seen people stow laptops in their book bags or purses, exposed to the elements. The thought of my MacBook Pro scraping against a doorframe when I miscalculate the force I should apply through my legs to get me where I think I thought I wanted to go is terrifying. Worse yet, think how much more traumatic tripping up the stairs would be if you lost your laptop, and not just your dignity.
• A waterproof laptop sleeve for your laptop to hide in when you’re not using it. One evening I was chilling with some friends in the kitchen. Another friend came in with some apple cider, and leaned dangerously close to my laptop.
  “Please don’t spill that on my laptop,” I said.
  “Of course I won’t,” he said.
  And then he did. But it was okay, because my laptop was in its sleeve. Phew.
• A laptop lock. MIT dorms are very safe. I leave my door unlocked and sometimes even open when I’m not there. Sometimes I leave my laptop alone (in its waterproof sleeve) on a table in a common area for the night. However, common areas on campus and in labs are not as safe. It’s a good idea to lock your laptop for bathroom or lunch breaks.
• A distinctive laptop sticker to identify your computer. So you don’t have to play musical laptops at airport security.

(If your computer does disappear at airport security or die, there are at least 20 computer clusters scattered throughout the main campus, not including the dorms.)

Once you have a shiny, padlocked computer, here are some programs and web sites that have been useful to me at MIT:

• F.lux. If sleep is not already important to you, it will become important to you. F.lux adjusts your computer’s display so that after sundown it emits red, instead of blue, light, and stops tricking you into thinking it’s daytime.
• Sleepyti.me tells you when and how much to sleep so that you feel rested in the morning, whenever morning is.
• iCal, Google Calendar, or another form of electronic calendar. Time management. ‘Nuff said.
• Thesaurus.com, so you use the right words in your essays and Facebook posts. I like to browse through synonyms until I find the perfect one. It’s like a treasure hunt.
• Fitocracy. Like Facebook, but for workouts.
• WolframAlpha. An amazing online calculator. It can calculate anything I've ever needed to calculate.
• LaTeX. A typesetting program that makes the documents you write look pretty. If you are course 6 (Computer Science and Electrical Engineering), you will have to submit your 6.006 (Introduction to Algorithms) problem sets using LaTeX. If you want to go into computer science, it would be even more useful to become familiar with Python and Unix/Linux. You might want to install Linux on your computer and start using it for practice.
• TextWrangler. A text editor that syntax colors your code. It works for every programming language I’ve heard of.
• Shirt.woot. Nerdy shirts.
• GIMP. A photo-editing program. Like Photoshop, but free.
• Hugin. A photo-stitching program, for making panoramas like these.

And some more, from my friends:

• Cockatrice, recommended by several people in Random Hall. Software for playing Magic: The Gathering online for free.
• Awesome Window Manager, recommended by Alex ‘15. Alex says that other tiling window managers are also good, such as bug.n for Windows; Athena, MIT's computing environment, uses xmonad.
• Evernote, recommended by Fangfei ‘11. “It’s a remember things thing.” It keeps track of recipes, finances, the research you’re doing for a paper, and almost anything else.
• Vim, a popular text editor that is useful for editing code fast, and according to Bobby '14 has been useful at all of his internships. An alternative is emacs, but my friend, a fellow Randomite whom I will only call Deep Vim, argues that vim is better because it uses fewer commands, takes up less memory, and doesn't hurt your pinky from pressing the control key for everything. Deep Vim actually started off using emacs, but his girlfriend at the time used vim. They got into a huge fight. Threats were made. They almost broke up. And then Deep Vim realized that his girlfriend was right, and vim was better.

There you have it. Add some speakers and you're electronically prepared for MIT. I leave you with three miscellaneous bytes of advice.

Label your power cord. A lot of people have power cords. It’s hard to remember which one is yours. An indiscreet dot in purple permanent marker can make tracking it down at least possible.

If you have a MacBook Pro, the power cord can get trapped between the screen and the keyboard and get chopped in half. Don’t let this happen to you.

Finally, back up your files. Bad things can happen if you don’t. Two weeks ago I copy/pasted a MySpace survey into a Word document containing 9026 words of unpublished blog material. The length went from 36 pages to several hundred. It was drenched in MySpace survey. Each line was a word more painful than the one before it. For example:

Did
Did you
Did you beleive
Did you beleive in
Did you beleive in cotties?

and so on for several hundred pages. Luckily TextWrangler was able to resuscitate the text of the file sans images and cotties. But things could have been ugly.

I soon discovered that I couldn’t choose between earrings in the morning. The worst was that they matched: how nice that pearl stud would look with that gold hoop, or that fake green diamond stud with that twisty metal thing. My indecision didn’t fade as I got older.

A turning point came when last weekend my friend Ami ’14 decided to get a cartilage piercing and I decided to tag along, ostensibly for moral support but inwardly with sinister ulterior motives. Finally, I thought, I would extinguish my morning dilemma. If I got my ears pierced again, I could wear two pairs of earrings at the same time. Never again would I have to choose between dangly earrings and studs.

But what if I got an infection from the piercing needle? Images of graffiti-covered basement tattoo parlors filled my head. What if they didn’t sterilize their needles?

Worse, what if the needle missed my ear completely? I’d endure an IAP-long struggle recovering from the horrible bleeding, only to get an infection that would last the whole semester. Even if I didn’t get stabbed in the wrong place I’d still get an infection from my own negligence, probably during the semester. I spent most of finals week living on Pop-Tarts; if I couldn’t even feed myself, how could I take care of two whole ears?

Would I look silly? Could I ever get a job? What about a mortgage? Could I ever be a real grownup?

I wondered if this was reminiscent of that time in middle school when I wanted to start wearing makeup so I could draw blue hearts around my eyes. People would see the two earrings and wonder if I couldn’t decide between studs and danglies in the morning and all I could say is yes, that is precisely why I paid money to have holes put in my body.

And then I saw my turtle earring, so green and lovable, and thought how wonderful it would be to wear it alongside my green studs. A little green turtle and a matching green dot. I could even get a smaller green turtle earring, so my ear could have a mommy turtle and a baby turtle. It would be so cute. And then I caved.

Ami picked out a place in Harvard Square that a lot of our friends recommended. It was freezing. We got on the wrong side of the Red Line, watched the wind chime installation, watched a train go by in the wrong direction, walked outside, crossed the street, and got on again on the other side.

The tattoo parlor looked surprisingly like a doctor’s waiting room with masks and red paint on the walls and relaxing music. We picked out our studs for the next eight weeks and signed a release form. After a few minutes I was called into the operating room.

It looked surprisingly like a doctor’s office, complete with a blue leather seat with a paper cover. My surgeon introduced himself as Greg. Greg had gauges in his ears, tattoos, and a palette of needles. He picked one up.

“Is this going to hurt?” I said.

“No,” he said, “it’s a marker.”

He marked my earlobes with two black dots and showed me in the mirror. Apparently Walmart put my first piercings in the wrong place. He would put the next two where the first two should have been.

Greg picked up a needle and said the piercing would feel like a shot. He told me to take a deep breath.

The prick in my ear was followed by a moment of panic. I held my breath. My heart kept beating. I thought I felt my sternum curl up toward my spine. Another deep breath.

And it was done. Greg explained how to clean my ears. Then it was Ami’s turn. Five minutes later we were free. We had pizza next door and took the T home.

People have mixed feelings about MIT’s campus, especially Stata. I personally love the dissonance in the architectural styles, the atmosphere of cumulative, continuing history it creates, and the view of the river. There’s romance in losing sleep and body heat to the lonely 3 am campus, soaking up the light reflecting off the snow and clouds and feeling alone with yourself and the footsteps you’re walking in.

I spent a few evenings last summer and this winter so far photographing campus and the Charles River to show you what I see. All of these are panorama photos stitched together using Hugin and edited with Gimp (both free), and all are clickable for a larger view.

The first snow of the season on the Charles River this past Monday night. The view is of Boston from Memorial Drive, directly across the street from Killian Court.

Views of the Stata Center from the street (top left) and from the courtyard (bottom). The Parsons Laboratory, the Whitehead Institute, and the Koch Institute from the same courtyard (top right).

Killian Court and the Great Dome, this past Monday night on the left and this past summer on the right. Zooming in reveals a snowman and a snow dalek in front of the Great Dome in the winter version.

The Charles River from the Harvard Bridge during a thunderstorm this past summer. My first glimpse of the Charles River was through a downpour, when I was temped in MacGregor for CPW. The walk to campus was miserable: cold air and colder rain and enough wind to annihilate my umbrella and propel the rain through my jacket. It was a complete misrepresentation of Boston weather. I actually have yet to re-experience that level of wretchedness since coming here as a student.

In this image Boston is on the right and MIT is on the other side of the river on the left. You can see the Green Building, the tallest building in MIT and in Cambridge, with a spherical white weather machine radome on its roof.

Sunset over the Charles River from the Harvard Bridge this past Saturday, on the evening of the Old New Year’s Day. The entrance to Killian Court is visible to the left of the Green Building.

The Charles River at sunset this past summer.

Another sunset over the Charles River, this time from MIT. Only Boston is visible, with the Harvard Bridge on the right.

Boston and the Charles River at night.

The berry of the West African Synsepalum dulcificum (miracle fruit) bush has been popular in the United States since the 70s for its temporary effect on taste. The berry’s miraculin glycoprotein (3.42 kilodaltons of carbohydrate, 21.2 kilodaltons of protein) binds to the sweetness receptors of the tongue and activates them in response to acid, making sour foods sweet without affecting other flavors. The change lasts as long as miraculin stays bound to our taste buds—fifteen to thirty minutes.

The maximum sweetness of acidic foods after miraculin is equal to that of a 17% sucrose solution, stronger than almost all known sweeteners. Miraculin has not been approved by the FDA as a sweetener or food additive, but is mass-produced in Japan through genetically modified tomatoes, E. coli, and lettuce. Interest in miraculin spiked after a May 2008 New York Times article on “flavor-tripping parties” in New York and again in 2011, correlated (correlation! not causation!) with protests against the Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill and the release of Radiohead album The King of Limbs. Multiple MIT living groups have had miracle berry parties, including Next House this past orientation and Theta Xi last campus preview weekend.

This Saturday evening Black Hole (the second floor of the north side of Random Hall) had its own fruit tasting party, with freeze-dried miracle fruit pulp pills, about 30 Randomites, and all the above and below foods.

Peanuts are nether sweet nor sour. They acted as our negative control and were, as expected, unchanged.

Strawberries changed the most dramatically. They had a strong new flavor of sweet layered over the already present strawberry sweet we know and love. Most of us liked them. Former Black Hole resident Zev B. ‘08 thought they tasted fake, and prefers the sour versions of most fruit.

Lemons and limes tasted like sweeter, more edible versions of themselves. They were no longer uncomfortably sour. Notably, according to Black Hole resident Catherine O. ‘12, lemons tasted like chicken when preceded by chocolate. Someone else confirmed that there was a meaty flavor that shouldn’t have been there.

Tomatoes and bell peppers adopted sweetness previously unknown to vegetables.

I didn’t try pickles but I heard they didn’t change.

Pineapple tasted like better pineapple.

Goat cheese tasted like a different cheese.

Vinegar was drinkable. It had flavor. I liked it. I wanted to compare it to flavored vinegar but realized that my teeth would be miserable and instead washed my mouth out with baking soda (which neutralizes acids). Kate O. ‘14, also a Black Hole resident, reported that apple cider vinegar unfortunately does not taste like apple cider.

If a 5-kg pumpkin is tossed through a snowstorm such that it reaches the peak of its trajectory one meter above the roof of the Green Building, which is 90 meters tall, with what velocity does the pumpkin meet the ground in McDermott Court? How much time, in seconds, does the airborne pumpkin have to come to terms with its identity* before landing? You may neglect wind, viscous drag, and the altered aerodynamics of cold, wet pumpkins for the sake of simplicity.

This past weekend’s wind and snow left over three million homes and businesses throughout the Northeast without power but promptly turned into a miserable deposit of slush when it hit Boston. Sometime after midnight on October 30th the slush mixed with the remains of over 100 shattered pumpkins in McDermott Court below the Cecil and Ida Green Building.

The Green Building, MIT's Building 54, was built on stilts in 1964 to circumvent Cambridge’s height limit. At 21 stories and 90 meters the Green Building became and remains the tallest building in Cambridge. Every October, First West, the smallest hall in the East Campus dorm, drops some large number of pumpkins—two dozen last year, over 100 this year—off the roof in front of lots of hosed, enthusiastic, and, this year, really cold, fellow MIT students.

On the left is my footage of the event. To the right is Isaque '15’s version, which is much higher quality. Full screen and watch both for maximum experience. Happy Halloween, and best of luck to those of you applying EA tomorrow. =)

* Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the pumpkin as it fell was, “Oh no, not again.” Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the pumpkin had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now.

Influenza A, subtype H3N2 is another swine flu virus. Like H1N1, it is endemic to birds, humans, and pigs, but it has been more widespread than H1N1 for the past ten years.

The influenza B virus is less common than influenza A. It affects humans, seals, and ferrets.

They all look something like this:

This semester I will catch none of these lovely bugs, because I got vaccinated! For free!

Every year, MIT administers the seasonal flu shots for free to students, employees, and dependents. Last month’s clinic vaccinated almost 3,000 people in six hours.

The process is remarkably efficient. When I showed up at the student center this afternoon there was no line. A nice man gave me a form to fill out and pointed me to a nice lady. The nice lady said hello, commented on my rollerblades, stuck a needle in my arm, pulled the needle out of my arm, and gave me a Band-Aid. The whole process took less than three minutes.

Being sick at MIT sucks. About two weeks ago I stayed up until 3 AM baking a cake in the image of Sputnik and talking with friends about math and economics and then woke up with a fever and a cough. The former lasted a few days and the latter turned into something like asthma that’s still not gone. Worse, around this time last year I missed two weeks of class because of a double ear infection (—like a double rainbow! with ear infections instead of rainbows! So intense.). MIT Medical, sleep, Ramen noodles, and S^3 are wonderful resources, but it’s still hard to recoup after weeks of missed class.

—which is why free flu shots and the subsequent decline in fevers and missed classes are awesome. I’m thrilled to say that this year I will not be getting pig flu, or bird flu, or people flu. (At least, not the flavors in the vaccination cocktail.)

Common symptoms of the flu include fever, cough, stuffy nose, fatigue, and headaches. Complications include pneumonia, infections of the heart and nervous system, ear and sinus infections, and worsening of preexisting asthma, diabetes, and heart failure. More than 200,000 people in the United States are hospitalized every year due to flu complications. About 36,000 people a year in the United States and 250-500,000 people worldwide die each year from the flu and flu complications.

Members of the MIT community can get a free flu shot by appointment with MIT Medical. There will also be another free walk-in clinic on November 14th at MIT Medical for children and families of the MIT community. If you are not at MIT you can get a flu shot at Kmart for $20.50, Target for $24.99, CVS for $29.99 minus a $5 gift card, Walmart for $25.00, Rite-Aid for $27.99, or Walgreens for $31.99. All locations administer the same cocktail of H1N1, H3N2, and Influenza B vaccine.

Destiny, the southern half of the first floor of Random Hall. One of three all-male floors in Random, and the only floor with monkey bars. From the floor description:

tl;dr - Awwwwww yyyyyeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Sometime between 2002 and 2005, the then nameless Destiny sold its naming rights on eBay for $36 and used the money to build stadium seating in the lounge. The highest bidder named Destiny after his daughter. Destiny as a floor is dating Loop, the southern half of the second floor, flowers and dinner included. Tonight we are in Destiny kitchen.

From left to right—

Phillip ’15, hiding behind the Cheez-Its. Phillip is a freshman on pass/no record. He intends to declare Course 4 (Architecture) as his major at the end of this year, when freshmen at MIT declare their majors.

Phillip is photographing apples he picked at Random Hall’s annual apple picking trip to Honey Pot Hill Orchard. Here’s his photograph of the apples:

Chad ’13, in the green shirt, stopped by the kitchen for a cup of tea on his way to fight an invisible space bear the printer. Chad is majoring in Course 22 (Nuclear Engineering).

Devin ’13 is watching the West Wing. A few minutes ago he was reading up on hyperinflation in Zimbabwe and Hungary. Devin is Course 18 (Math).

Cory ’13, a Course 2 (Mechanical Engineering) major, is working on a 2.006 (Thermal Fluids Engineering II) problem set. 2.006 is the second in a two-class series on thermodynamics, heat transfer, and fluid flow. This problem set is on boundary layers and laminar external flows, neither of which I understand.

Erons ’12, also Course 2 (“I major in Awesome.”), is taking a break from his own tooling to help Cory with his p-set. Otherwise Erons is working on his term project for 2.009 (Product Engineering Processes). In addition to launching angry birds at each other, 2.009 students spend the semester designing and building awesome consumer products that they later present to the MIT community.

Me, on the couch, taking this photo. I am looking at pictures of agarose gels for my UROP, doing my 6.042 (Math for Computer Science) homework, and writing this blog post (how meta).

I leave you with a photo of Erons’s angry bird in a chair: