Recent reflections.. and observations

Honors banquet tonight. It's inspiring every year. These people are amazing. It makes me wonder what on earth have I been doing in my 3 yrs of undergrad life. Literally nothing, sitting on my butt doing nothing. And it's especially inspiring this year many of the people who were mentioned are my year and I know them. The Norris prize went to a classmate, haha a Hum classmate. I've always enjoyed the company of the really smart people but I don't seem to be meeting a lot of them, well, maybe I just don't interact with them. Classmates-wise, at least.. This yr's Norris prize winner really deserves it. He is smart, inspiring and very nice. 3 people that I took Hum with that I thought were deserving of the prize, Susan, Dan and Allen. And well, he got it.

Then we heard Allen's story. I'm absolutely amazed. We were all amazed in class at his quick thinking, great speech skills. And if anything, he taught me to not sit back and wait. To get anything done, you'll have to get up and do it. Double major, start an international community service organization, get published, all in 3 years. Beat that.

So what if a GPA is 3.8? It's the attitude towards everything that counts. And mine stinks. I gotta look up Kant's categorical imperatives. They come up every year at Revelle talks. And it kinda makes me miss Hum classes..

Been going to science talks, geared towards undergrads, how nice of them. Figured out some of my own goals to work on..
1. Do good science
2. Mix with the intelligent people (I need that intellectual stimulation, I'm not saying people around me are not smart, it's just that it's really rare to find someone who's really inspiring in classes.. I have plenty of friends who throw out intellectual ideas each time we talk)
3. Be able to explain things well (I was explaining the cloning process to this new undergrad in lab and I think I did a terrible job. He'd better ask me questions or he really won't get it)
4. Network.


It seems to me that people are not looking for what you've learnt, they're looking for the unique experience that you have, they're looking for the personality. It's not possible to hide behind skills and grades and stuff on paper. They're looking for a smart nice person who just happened to fill the need that they have.


Anyway, the expo helped me decide to do get a phd.


Dr Luft was saying how his engineer brother has finally figured out that his passion is in religion, psychology, family.. I wonder where my real passion is. I was supposed to have found it in college. Again I wonder what I've been doing. He was also saying that Humanities is not a knowledge that one can pass on to another like science, it's about discovering for yourself what life is all about, what makes us human. That's the meaning of humanities anyway. Maybe it's precisely because of that, because we don't know/ don't dare to discover for ourselves, about ourselves that we choose science and try to do humanities the scientific way. Cold, objective. It's why I don't enjoy the humanities so much. It's hard work, all this exploring and discovering.


In psychoacoustics we read about musicians conducting scientific experiments on sound and music and how we perceive them. First I've always thought Biology was not scientific enough because there's too much of oh-I-saw-this-in-this-cell-&-I think-it's-the-norm-from-how-I-eyeballed-it. It's not quantitative enough (though of course, it's getting more quantitative every day). Then came psychology and yeah they do numbers and stats, but they just seem to be telling you really obvious things that you already know like Japanese people feel more like part of a group but Americans feel more like individuals. Then we get to psychoacoustics. They're experiments that have interesting questions, but are really hard to answer. This guy thinks that each composer has his own internal rhythm that's different from others and if you play a piece by Beethoven using Mozart's internal rhythm, you'll sound terrible. And he tested it by tweaking rhythmic variables on MIDI files until they sound somewhat musical and overlaid different composers' rhythms on other composers' works and getting people to decide which overlay sounded the best. This is not even eyeballing, this is cochlea-ing.. You arbitrarily decide that this variation sounds good on Brahms so you call it the Brahms rhythm. (if you want more info on this expt, ask me)


Second (gosh this is getting long), I have my cancer class before the psychoacoustics class. So we talk about increasing survival rates and getting better diagnosis and treatment methods in that class. And then I go to my acoustics class and looking at those expts and reading those papers makes me marvel at how unimportant the questions are. Do we really care if a 240c interval sounds like a maj 2nd but a 260c interval sound like a min 3rd? It's fun to know. But in a world that is in the self-destruction mode, should we care about such trivial differences?


I guess arts can only fluorish in stable times, where survival is not a problem. And at least I'm interested in knowing how people perceive music, though the expts are really hard to do. It's almost impossible to find controls or to tweak only 1 variable at a time. Went to RFBF concert last night. They played Stockhausen's Mikrophonie I on the world's largest gong. It was quite a piece of art. Sonically and visually. I thought the piece was about making sounds on the gong using different objects but it's really about using the gong to resonate sounds made by the different objects. And objects included things like bicycle wheel and giant comb and brush that made really neat sounds. I'm glad I got to hear such a masterpiece live. And then they played this pulsars piece that I just didn't get. The surround sound was cool with 6 percussionists in 6 different parts of the hall surround the audience. And it's really fun when they do the surround sound thing where this snare roll was passed from one station to the other. But I don't get how the piece connected with pulsars at all. It was random.

All right, that was a long spiel. Get things which I've wanted to blog for a long time out finally. Time to stop procrastinating and start working. Oh yeah, it was great talking to all my fave profs tonight.