It was my older sister’s birthday yesterday, and it had me thinking about how we talk about birthdays. There’s a peculiar inconsistency in the language we use which I vaguely noticed for the first time a couple of years ago, but never really pursued the thought. We index our birthdays from 0. ...

I’ve been sitting around, trying to determine what I wanted to write for this week. I’ve had a few underwhelming posts over the past month, due to some time constraints and missed deadlines, so I’m really aiming for ideas with a bit more substance. I try to make note of some ideas I have, whether that is quotes from books I read, ideas from podcasts, little pictures, or just something that pops into my head that I want to save for later. I was going through those notes and determined this is the right time to get to something I heard a high school girl say at a Starbucks a few months ago. ...

Although I missed another Monday deadline (spring break has really gotten me in disarray), it was for good reason. My parents were visiting in San Diego, and it was fun getting to do some of the more “tourist” type places with people who had fresh eyes for the area. But more importantly, my dad and I went to Petco Park to watch the Padres. Baseball season is finally back, and it makes me incredibly happy. ...

As part of my year of focus, I’ve been trying to spend more consistent chunks of time working on programming. In particular, right now I’m focusing on doubling down on my Python knowledge, and exploring some other aspects of computer science that interest me. After checking out a few books and tutorials, I’ve made my way back to a website that I found a number of years ago, which is the most intriguing to me: Project Euler. ...

I missed my first self-imposed Monday deadline in a while. I’ve actually been on Spring Break, in a sense. My girlfriend is in town visiting, and we’ve been staying pretty busy. Tomorrow we’re on our way to Universal Studios Hollywood. We both went to the Orlando location back in high school, so we’re somewhat familiar with what it has to offer. But it will be an excellent time. I just wanted to write this brief post as a marker of my failed deadline, but to keep the number of posts per week consistent enough. ...

I decided to go watch Free Solo this afternoon. I had seen a snippet of Alex Honnold’s 60 Minutes special while in high school, and remember being impressed. Then I discovered this documentary about him won an Oscar. Even better, it was being shown in some local theaters. The short version is this: No film has made me feel less competent and driven, yet I don’t envy necessarily envy Alex’s single-mindedness. ...

Up front, here is a link to my math blog that has the meat of this post. Also, there will be a PDF version attached. I’ve finally gotten around to writing another math post. There’s a mix of reasons why I’ve been writing about a lot of other things. First, there have just been other topics in the front of my mind that I felt like writing about in the moment. Second, there were not any particular pieces of math I felt inspired to write about. And third, preparation of a math post is significantly more work for me, as I care a lot about being accurate, precise, and clear in my presentation. ...

The other day, I finally finished making my room fairly clean and I tidy. I put together a bookshelf to house some odds and ends, removed the final cardboard boxes still hanging around since I moved in, and sorted my papers. I felt good. But something was still missing. This week’s Comical Start episode featured me discussing my desire for a Roomba “just to have something that seems like it’s alive in my apartment.” However, a Roomba is not in my future. After a healthy discussion of why an actual pet is not a possibility right now, Grant and I decided I would get a plant. As a result, I went out Saturday morning and got myself a little succulent. My new pal, Calvin (naturally named after the spiky-haired first-grader Calvin) ...

And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby A few weeks ago I read The Great Gatsby for the first time. It was a pretty good book. I don’t have much experience reading Fitzgerald, and the style of his era – as well as the upper class focus – is a bit different from what I normally read. I enjoyed the story, but the only thing that really stuck with me was the quote above. It is not central to the book, but I find it particularly profound and relevant today. ...

During a recent recording of OHAC, we talked about yearly themes. In short, yearly themes are meant to be broader versions of resolutions. They are not necessarily defined by explicit goals, but rather a frame of mind, or a general approach to the upcoming year. We talk about it in that episode, and there are links to episodes of the podcast Cortex with more information about the idea of yearly themes. My theme is the *Year of Focus*. Now that I have more freetime on my hands, I want to use it to help improve my attention span and make significant progress on projects I put off while in college. The first step in this, before it was even official, was the reading binge I’ve written about a few times now. ...