Sam's L33t Journal

It's yet another one of those times when I don't post for weeks at a time because I'm alternating between being busy and wrecked! So, jumping back:

Seattle was lovely! The winter weather was very nice. Only two days of our nine there were notably rainy, and overall it was very mild. We did some touristy things, spent a lot of time hanging out with DJ and Mishy (including a lovely New Year's celebration / early birthday celebration for Erica at their home), briefly met up with David and Kelcy (who were in from Portland, Oregon for New Year's), had dinner with Susan (one of Julie's Church Lab friends), took the kid for a swim in the hotel pool, and spent the entire time drinking good coffee. Good friends, good food, generally a wonderful, relaxing trip.

We did manage to get in a little business while we were there, too: Julie took the opportunity for some face-to-face meetings with Seattle-area biotech contacts, and I got out to Google Kirkland to meet with a team I'd collaborated with on some 20%-project work and to say hello to Mark Chang (one of my Olin profs who's now working at Google).

On the way back, Eris had a seat to herself on the plane for the first time. I was actually looking forward to being required to pay for the extra seat by that point, she's definitely getting quite a bit too big to be an infant in lap. (Having another seat to put carry-on bags under also means a lot in terms of legroom.)

After returning, I came down with a bad cold that had me working from home basically the entirety of last week.

On Thursday, Eris came down with a bad stomach bug. This one was her first real stomach bug as a toddler (the full waterworks, and a long night of not being able to keep down even water). Needless to say no one enjoyed the experience. Had to wipe down the whole house and do all the laundry. Fortunately, the worst of it seemed to be a 24-hour affair.

Friday through Monday was MIT Mystery Hunt, which I got to experience from the writing side this year, since my team, Death & Mayhem, won last year's hunt. I can't say I contributed as much as many members of my team (my contribution to the writing process was mostly limited to a bit of test-solving), but Julie did pull a lot of extra weight on childcare this weekend (including on her birthday) so I could help out some weekend-of. I helped run a couple of the interactions, but mostly I called phones (made 569 callbacks about puzzle answers over the long weekend).

This year's Hunt was themed after Pixar's Inside Out, putting hunters inside the mind of a student having an emotional crisis as they try to win the 2018 Health & Safety Hunt run by Team Life & Order. Teams solved layers of puzzles to get the five emotions back to HQ, recover four lost core memories, and complete the epic Health & Safety walkaround. 12 teams completed the hunt, led by last year's writing team, Setec Astronomy (whose tongue-and-cheek pledge to never write Hunt again seems to have not stuck for very long at all).

Overall, Hunt went amazingly well, the puzzles were great and it was a ton of fun. I'll post some links to that once they're up in the archive (presumably after the part of the team working on tech has had a few days to recover).

Today, I'm sick. Despite my best hygiene efforts, I'm down with whatever stomach bug Eris had. This seems to be a really bad winter, disease-wise.

Eristic improvements: Jumping in place unassisted, more intricate play with building toys (duplo, magnablocks, traintrack toys, and the like).

I continue to fail to write.

Last weekend was the MIT Mystery Hunt. This year was Alice in Wonderland themed, surprisingly a Hunt theme that hadn't been done before. I wasn't able to focus on hunt as much as in past years, but I participated some. My team had their best performance yet, actually finishing all of hunt this time and coming in fifth place. Puzzles and solutions are here, my favorite puzzles included:

• A round played in reverse
• A fitting sequel to last year's Etsy puzzle
• A straightforward physical object puzzle that was nonetheless really cool
• This brilliant crossword puzzle
• A good duck puzzle, as usual
• One cool logic puzzle

My work continues to be busy, but I'm finally seeing some positive results on my project of the last few weeks. The reading group at work is now reading Joel on Software.

Watched The Wolf Children Ame and Yuki, which was everything I expected from Mamoru Hosoda (the director). A good, moving story, and some really well-done animation.

Went out to a concert on Wednesday, saw Elizabeth and the Catapault at Brighton Music Hall. Good stuff. Opening band was Neulore.

This weekend, Melissa (my sister) is in town and we're taking some time to visit extended family.

It continues to be super-cold in Boston, but this week's snowstorm wasn't nearly as bad as anticipated.

This all seems pretty fragmentary, which is yet another reminder to write things I want to write when they're fresh in my head.

The MIT Mystery Hunt was this weekend. It was fun. This year's Hunt was themed after "The Producers"; Max and Leo are up to their usual schemes and require the teams' help to make their new scam plays into sure-fire box-office flops (included rounds of puzzles like "A Circus Line" (meta-puzzle solution: ELEPHANT IN A TUTU), "Okla-Holmes-a" (CORNY CLUES), and "Into the Woodstock" (RAPUNZEL HAS AFRO)).

Puzzles and solutions are here. Cool puzzles I helped on:
Pure and Simple (figured out the form when the Muse struck, helped solve the rest)
Zugzwaang (someone pointed out the misspelling, I figured out the form from that plus Wikipedia and helped solve)
Tax... In... Space... (this is a straightforward(ish) puzzle)
Winning Condtions (someone else figure out the form, I wrote a program to help solve it)
Sounds Good to Me (Xave figured out the form, I helped solve)

The above are all pretty decent puzzles to try if you like puzzles (the answer to Hunt puzzles is always a word or short phrase), or just to look at the solutions if you're curious how such things are designed.

In unrelated Boston news, it is now COLD.

Hunt is on, with a Mario (or video games in general) theme this year. Unfortunately, I can't brain today, due to a cold. Hopefully once some helpful medicine kicks in, I'll be up and running.

Xave's Dresden Files tabletop game is starting, which looks like it should be fun. I'm still not a big fan of Fate, though, it requires more fiction-writing-type creativity than I actually have.

There's other stuff I should comment on, but I've been behind on everything this week.

SIPB talk today by Keith Winstein about "The Non-Conflict Between Bayesians and Frequentists" was interesting.

Basically, the two approaches to probability are as follows: Bayesians use prior probability (which may involve assumptions) to calculate the probability of a result given a new piece of data. Frequentists determine what answer they can give that will be right a given percentage of the time.

There's no real conflict, mathematically, it's just a matter of looking at different things. Bayesians look at the error rate among positive results, Frequentists look at the rate of false positives. Alternately, Bayesians focus on giving the best answer for every possible input, Frequentists focus on being most reliable overall for every possible output.

Less flatteringly: Bayesians use all of the information they have, but also some of the information they don't. Frequentists are reliable overall, but are willing to tell you manifestly untrue things so long as they only do so a small percentage of the time.

Frequentist vs. Bayesian is far from the only issue, which specific statistical test you use matters. Then again, the difference between reasonable statistical tests (even ones overly permissive for some values) might not be that significant in numerical terms, even if the difference can be quite substantial in financial terms.

Still, the conflict has some relevance to science. If you assume that people are studying a wide variety of hypotheses, only a tiny portion of which is likely to actually reflect the real world, then you might only have to admit a small percentage of false positives before the false positives overwhelm the true results.

Started the long weekend today, alternating time between Arisia and Mystery Hunt.

Mystery Hunt: Kickoff was great, great bunch of puzzles this year, I solved one with a small team of hunters and was a minor help on a few others.

Arisia: The panels didn't really draw me in, although there are some more interesting ones later in the weekend. It was great to see Anna again, and I also ran into a bunch of other people I haven't seen in a while. Really a great crowd. Looking forward to some of the parties tomorrow night.

Decided to walk home in the freezing wind rather than trying to crash on a couch, since I sleep miserably in suboptimal conditions. I wish I could just skip it, but I know from experience that a proper night's sleep is the way to go if I want to maximize my fun overall.

Today is National Hug Day. I was informed of this fact by a jubilant reveler offering passerby free hugs in Lobby 7. (An offer I gleefully accepted.)

*hugs* for all who want one! Have you hugged someone today?

Today was initially pretty blah. However, I went swing dancing at MIT in the evening (at the urging of some Oliners). That completely turned my mood around. It was really wonderful. I wasn't the only beginner there, and people generally switched around, so I had no problem finding people to dance with.

After that, the rest of the evening went great. It's amazing how wonderful things are when I'm in a good mood.

(One random thing: Walking near Davis square at night, I heard loud birdcalls, with the type of call changing completely every three or four repetitions. Perhaps a very loud mockingbird was confused by the street lights and low-hanging clouds? Or maybe someone has a birds of the world car alarm...)

Heading into town on Friday, getting off the train, I saw a girl wearing a blue Naruto-style ninja headband with a musical note on it. This led to the following conversation:
Me: "Hey, I've seen you somewhere before, haven't I?"
Ninja: "Possibly."
*awkward silence*
Me: *realizing that there was really no point to saying that in the first place* "Er... sorry to bother you..."

As it turns out (not entirely unexpectedly), this person was one of the other regulars at anime club. She showed a little after I arrived:
Me: "I knew I recognized you from somewhere. Then again, there can't be that many people running around Boston wearing ninja headbands."
Ninja: "I've run into other people wearing those on the train before."
Me: o_O

So, apparently Boston has a relatively (compared to zero) high number of ninja-filker-Naruto-fans. How interesting.

What else... I've been working on my midterm paper for linear algebra this weekend.

Also, today (yesterday) was t3h K4t's 20th birthday, so there was a party for that. Happy birthday, K4tz0r (although I doubt you're reading this; no matter, I told you in person, too).

I saw the dentist today. The street didn't blow up this time.

I played a bunch of DDR, worked on faster songs, beat Senorita, La Senorita Virtual, and Speed Over Beethoven on Heavy.

I went hacking with Xave and Phaeton, then watched some Cowboy Bebop.