Today

Reading through some of my older posts, I realized that I haven't been writing about anything that's happened in my day to day life recently.  For me, I think reading what I actually did on some day three years ago is more entertaining than reading some random thoughts I decided to spill out on this blog.

Today, my technical writing class was cancelled because the professor is conducting resume consultations for every student in her class.  I had mine last week.

I woke up at 10AM, took a shower, ate some cereal, and worked on some intermediate dynamics homework before heading off to office hours at 12:30PM.

I had intermediate dynamics office hours until 2PM.  The office hours aren't very helpful because there are so many students and the labs are hard.  Currently, we are working with simulink, which is a block diagram extension of MATLAB.  I wish the class delved into this more thoroughly, because the topic is useful and interesting but has a steep learning curve.  Two hours a week doesn't do solving ODEs and learning numerical methods on MATLAB justice.

From 2PM to 4PM, I had my GE class, American and Californian Politics.  The class is fairly boring, and the lectures don't even cover Californian politics.  The class seems to be mostly review from high school.  We finished learning about Congress and started learning about the president and executive branch.  The electoral college exists basically because the framers were elitists and wanted to separate the mob from politics.  There have been four instances where candidates lost the popular vote but won electorally.  Polarization of the US into Democrats and Republicans (or rather, liberals and conservatives) and the near elimination of big fringe states (like former California and Texas) has been a relatively recent development (~2000).

From 4PM to 5PM, I had my intermediate dynamics lecture.  We reviewed work/energy and kinetic diagrams (aka MKD).

After I got back, I had a phone interview for a job.  The recruiter asked non technical questions to assess my personality.  Three words that describe me are: creative, open, and teamworker.  A problem I encountered in a team setting was the lack of time and communication in a psychology project in high school right around when us poor seniors were applying for colleges.  We resolved this problem by splitting up research and writing and having one compiler for the final thing (which was me).  When I told the recruiter I might not be available the whole summer because of study abroad, she politely closed the conversation with the recommendation that I reapply for an internship next year.

Right now, my plan is to fly to Maryland to do computational research for the Army.  The internship pays well but I want to stay close to home during my unusually short summer (which is about 1.5 months).  I think staying close to home will help me start and finish some projects that have been on my mind and increase my chances of getting a girl friend.  With two cars and two drivers back home, I have more flexibility for taking girls out on dates.  Plus I managed to find/reconnect with a few cute girls that probably have some degree of interest in me.

Since then, I worked on my technical writing assignment, writing a proposal memo for a technical report on drones, installed and played some L4D2, microwaved and ate some leftover dinner from last night, watched some TV (Cosmos was on, NDT was talking about extinction and continental drift), and procrastinated some more on reddit.

The Ukraine crisis seems to be going still.  Some more Russian aircraft were shot down recently.  From a western standpoint, Putin's actions seem unjustifiable and irrational but I can begin to see why Russia has continued to act the way it has despite economic sanctions when I look at the big picture.  I can almost begin to appreciate that the United States + friends aren't the single military power in the world.  I may want to take back this statement in a decade.

There are some big projects that I want to work on but I can't when I have schoolwork on my mind, even if I have the time.  I was hoping to do these projects over the summer but this may be impossible depending on my internship situation.

For now, I have the Ski Club house boating trip this weekend to look forward to.  I haven't been piss drunk since last quarter and it'll be nice hanging out with my CPSC buds again.

Engineers and Scientists as Politicians?

Some think that electing engineers and scientists as politicians is a good idea but you need only look at a university research institution to see how much bureaucracy and partisanship exists.  Humans are ultimately humans and a person's profession does not make him much different from another.

That said, the type of people we are electing into office is not as much of a problem as how the government is set up to run.  Congressmen make decisions driven by re-election, and for re-election, they must cater to their own arbitrary territorial groups (aka constituents).  Catering to the needs of the party the congressman is associated comes second to the needs of the constituents.  The problem is that these groups of people have conflicts with the interests of other groups of people.  Everyone wants to free ride.  Everyone wants to pay minimal taxes and receive maximal benefits from the government, and they don't like it when the money goes to other people.  It's analogous to hatchlings fighting for nurture and food from their mother.

What we can take from the engineering and science community is how they approach problems: objectively.  Treat bettering the country and upholding some basic ideologies as the end goal and work towards that goal as a team.  Solve free riding problems by dissolving regional boundaries and having the nation identify as one entity composed by a diverse group of people, not a diverse group of groups.

I will come back later to contemplate on these naive remarks.