Manners

Dear friends,

I realize I have not updated my blog in over a week. This is probably because nothing blog-worthy has happened to me. Well, that's not exactly true. Lots of blog-worthy things have happened to me that I didn't really remember when I actually had time to blog, so no blogging about these things took place, and they are probably lost forever. Or maybe I'll remember them later. Who knows.

Anyway! I would write about my trip to London today, which was very fun (met up with old friend from middle school, friend who did CME and is back in London now, and went to hear the LSO...again), but what I'm actually going to write about is my trip BACK from London, because it's far more amusing, and, let's face it, you've all had enough of my "and then I did this followed by this with a dash of this-and-that" entries.

The British are big on manners. This is well known. A littler known fact is that only MOST of the Brits are big on manners. I discovered this today on my really, really long train ride back from London.

I had the misfortune of catching the 2200 Liverpool St. -> Ipswich train, which is essentially a door-to-door service on rails. I think they built some extra platforms in the middle of nowhere and gave them creative English-sounding names just so the train could stop at more stations.

I had the additional misfortune of picking the World's Loudest Coach (aka "The Coach that I happened to board b/c I was sprinting to catch the train"). The train ride started with a very loud gentleman behind me making a call on his mobile phone (this is generally considered impolite). He then proceeded to have the World's Most Boring Conversation with presumably the World's Most Easily Amused Person (I don't know who else could have stood to talk to him for that long). I will fill out this description with a representative quote:

"The dinner was nice. Except there were these two queens there, and they were very bratty. You know, just so queen-like. They must have picked me out as a fellow queen, you know? And they were just going on and on saying things like 'Oh, we don't DO public transport.'"

Comment 1: I did not realize it was in style to announce things like this to an entire train coach.

Comment 2: Perhaps these two lovely men do not "do" public transport because there are annoying men talking loudly on their mobiles incessantly. Just a thought.

I wished several times over the course of the evening that I had some method of recording the conversation, because it was that ridiculous. Queenie then proceeded to ask his hypothetical conversational partner how his lunch went. Unfortunately, he had to ask this question about three times, because the reception was poor. Maybe the reception was poor because poor reception is a sign from God that you shouldn't be torturing people on the phone and in your general vicinity with your boring life. About every five minutes he would lose signal and promptly dial his friend back. At one point, he was talking (loudly) about how he'd gotten his driving license revoked because he, quote, "killed a few people and they're just so bothered about that kind of thing these days." I assumed he was joking, but then he went on to say "well, I don't actually kill people, but if I did, those two queens at the party would be at the top of my list." Once again, not the thing I would necessarily announce loudly on a train, but that's just my opinion.

If I were the kind of person who killed people, people who talk loudly on their mobile for half an hour on the night train when people like me are trying to sleep would be on the top of MY list. Just saying.

Not that sleep was an option. On the OTHER side of me were three girls of varying ages who were trying to arrange a ride from Ipswich Station to some adjacent town. They attempted to procure this ride, loudly, and via mobile device, while the teenager in the group whined incessantly about how this procurement effort was "ruining her social life."

The train ride was an hour and a half long. I thought my head was going to explode.

This brings me to my other point about manners. English culture forbids confrontation with an offender. You are allowed to eye-roll, sigh loudly, shift about, and complain to non-offenders (but not TOO loudly), but you must never, ever ask the perpetrator of annoying behavior to stop. English culture also apparently requires you to constantly inform people if they are NOT bothering you. Twice over the past week, I have had people change seats from sitting near me to sitting somewhere else, and they have politely informed me of their reasons for doing so, and assured me repeatedly that it WAS NOT because I was doing anything wrong. It occurred to me several times that I could a) confront the offenders or b) change coaches. Obviously, aforementioned rules forbids option a, and I chose not to elect option b because I was legitimately concerned that I was going to offend someone. Good lord I've become English.

In the English manner system, queue jumping is very, very bad. That might not seem like much of a denouncement to Americans, but keep in mind that "quite nice" in English means "outstandingly, unbelievably amazing," so "very, very bad" is something awful indeed. However, I have found it exceedingly hard not to queue jump, but only because there is a queue for absolutely everything. Case in point: when the tube (aka "subway") pulls up, everyone forms a queue to get on the train (of course letting all the other passengers off first, politely). However, the doors to get on the train are about 4 people wide, and yet there is invariably a single-file queue. This is not how it would work in Boston. It is physically uncomfortable for me to sit in the queue, and to resist the urge to jump it, yet I must, or I will be given very dirty looks (the horror).

If I think of anything else blog-worthy to post, you have my e-word that I will do it promptly ("promptly" being defined as "when I get around to it").

Most sincerely and politely,

Crazyank

Weekend in Ireland

I realize this is coming a full week after my actual Ireland trip. I was busy, and am not going to succumb to the typical English habit of apologizing for everything. I'm NOT sorry! Hah!

Anyway, my trip to Ireland was relatively uneventful, although I did have to get to the bus stop at 4:30AM to catch the bus to Stanstead. Ryanair is a wonderful airline if you want to travel to various parts of Europe essentially for free (my bus fair to Stanstead cost more than my round-trip ticket to Ireland), but not as good if you want to be able to pack anything more than a toothbrush (I wore about half the clothes I brought to Ireland with me on the plane. It was warm).

In Ireland, I was staying with my friend John. John's brother, Patrick, went to MIT, so I've known John since he came to visit Patrick this one time a few years ago. John is going to Harvard next year and had just finished his leaving certs (basically exit exams for the Irish school system), so I guess he was out pretty late partying the night before I came. This explains why John's dad, not John, came to pick me up from the airport early Saturday morning (I guess John's mom commandeered his phone and sent some explanatory texts from it, which I thought was very creative).

I flew into Shannon, and John lives in Limerick. After being fed a second breakfast of scones, jam, and cream (I cannot explain how delicious this is...I wish I could take an infinite supply back with me to the states) by John's culinarily (not a word, according to Safari spell-checker, but who cares) talented mom/mum Lily, John and I wandered into Limerick along the beautiful river that runs by their house. We met up with John's dad later to watch the Lions/South Africa match (my FIRST rugby match!) in a pub (my first Irish pub!), where I learned how to watch Rugby (i.e. cheer loudly and complain about the scrum, more or less).

My arrival coincided with the 15th birthday party of Tommy, John's lovely younger brother. John's family already has a trampoline in their backyard, but for the occasion, a bouncy castle was also brought in (along with enough food to feed a small army, including Twitter-themed cupcakes...). John and I had spent part of the evening making questionable cookies, based on our sudden and urgent need to consume cook dough (ingredient ratios are important, it turns out. Who knew?).

Limerick has a reputation of being kind of a rough place. I heard from Lily that it sometimes was called "stab city." Well, within a few hours of being in Limerick, I already had a busted lip! The story is less interesting, and more or less I will leave you with the thought that lying down on a trampoline is almost always a bad idea, and being kicked in the face hurts.

Over the course of the evening, the trampoline migrated to be closer to the bouncy castle, and we spent a good hour or so diving from the trampoline to the bouncy castle under various premises (trampoline rugby is the best game every invented...you score a try by getting the rugby ball to the bouncy castle...but will England have a team for the 2012 Olympics? Stay tuned to find out...). I've uploaded a few videos to facebook.

It came up in the course of conversation that John's family still had Patrick's old violin lying around, which I had the pleasure of playing. Although it hasn't been particular well taken care of over the past few years, it's a really good violin! I kind of (ok, really) wanted to take it home with me. It's got quite an impressive, resonant tone. Oh well, reason to visit Ireland again, at least...oh right, that, and because it's one of the most beautiful places on Earth.

I have to say, after spending a few months in England, I was surprised at how social and laid back the Irish were. The English fear of social interaction with all but the closest of friends is completely counterbalanced by the Irish penchant for making random (and, in my case, totally unintelligible) conversation with complete strangers (good thing the smile and nod method works just as well in Ireland). And the people are so nice! And relaxed! I think "chill" is the word I'm looking for. Then again, if you lived in a place as beautiful and scenic as Ireland, you'd probably be relaxed too (no offense, English countryside).

John, me, and my new friend Alan went down to Dublin on Sunday (under the guise of giving Alan a ride home). I LOVE Dublin! I have to say, Dublin isn't a city like Paris or Rome (or London) where you go to SEE things...it's more like a city where you go to just hang out. But, for hanging out, there is no better city. I just loved the atmosphere there. We toured Trinity College (where Alan is going to school next year), including seeing the Book of Kells (the oldest surviving Celtic manuscript, which was absolutely amazing to see), the library, and the infectious diseases exhibit in the science hall. Afterwards, we went to the Guiness Storehouse (can't go to Dublin without going to the Guiness Storehouse!). The top floor is a 360 degree circular windowed room overlooking the whole of Dublin. It's breathtaking. And also there's something really cool about drinking Guiness from the place where it originated while looking out over Dublin. *sigh* We then went to one of Alan's favorite haunts, the Boar's Head. It was a traditional Irish pub, and I loved the atmosphere (and the delicious food, of course). It wasn't quite as happening on a Sunday afternoon as it might have been otherwise, but I still loved the experience.

Sunday evening was uneventful. John and I got home too late to really go out again on Sunday night, so we went to bed instead (after watching an episode of Top Gear...mmmm Lotus). The next morning, I packed up and John fulfilled his end of the Twitter deal.

Allow me to explain. John visited MIT last April before he made the (tragic) decision to go to Harvard. While there, he encouraged me to get Twitter, and I said I wasn't interested. He kept bugging me, and I kept saying no. Well, seeing as John was hosting me in Ireland, I was feeling conciliatory, so I agreed finally that if he arranged a picnic on the cliffs overlooking the sea (something picturesque that I'd always kind of wanted to do), that I would get Twitter. Unbeknownst to John, my work at this summer has required me to use Twitter on occasion, so I already had a Twitter account (@crazyank, for those interested in the random happenings of my life, updated biweekly or so, which is less often than my blog). John, being kind, still took me for a picnic at the cliffs of Moher.

A picture is worth 1000 words. Go on facebook and look at the pictures. And then remember that it is a million times more stunning in real life. I want to go back.

I flew out Monday evening, and, remembering my harrowing trip through immigration at Heathrow ("are you SURE you're not a terrorist?"), I was a bit nervous. However, they just waved all the passengers from Ireland right through Immigration, so I was pretty happy. I got back home just in time to collapse from exhaustion!

Interesting observation about the UK and Ireland:

The cops aren't armed. I'm not kidding. When John told me this, I literally said "but how are they supposed to stop people from committing crimes?" I mean, imagine if cops didn't have guns in the US. No one would take them seriously! "Come over here...I DARE you to stop me from robbing this bank? What are you going to do? Scold me?" Then again, I have a very funny image of a proper British cop doing just that:

British cop: (politely) "Good sir, stop what you're doing there at once! Please."

Robber: (politely) "Oh, my good man, I must refuse. So sorry"

British cop: "I must then be forced to scold you very sternly."

This probably wouldn't fly in the States. Gun culture is vastly different in the UK and the US. Gun control laws are very, very strict here, so it's actually safe for most UK cops to assume that your average criminal isn't armed. You can't make that assumption in the US. While not everyone has guns, like some people in the UK tend to think, it statistically looks like it to a UK citizen, because in the UK, almost no one at all has guns.

We have a long way to go...

In conclusion, I absolutely loved Ireland and know I will find a way to go back some day. I've been catching up on work since I got back, and will hopefully have another entry up soon!

Check pictures on facebook!

What a week!

I had an amazing week!

On Tuesday, Jeff took me to Birmingham to meet Aaron Sloman, a famous A.I. and cognitive science researcher. He does work similar to Marvin Minsky of MIT. Aaron is notoriously busy, so I was expecting to get maybe an hour to talk with him (Jia-Yan came along as well for the morning). Much to my surprise, Aaron spent most of the day with me (and Jeff, when he was there), and I spoke with him probably for a total of about 3 hours just about his research and ideas for A.I. systems. It was such an amazing opportunity! I also got an opportunity to sit in on some lab meetings and get a tour of one of the A.I. vision lab. It was such a great day!

On Wednesday, I left work a bit early to go down to London. David (my friend from my lab at MIT who I stayed with in London) was supervised on his PhD partly by a UCL professor named Vince Walsh. David had told me what an amazing and inspirational guy Vince was, so I jumped at the chance to meet him while I was in England. David had told me that Vince was a huge classical music fan, so I asked if he might want to catch a concert. We settled on the LSO Concert on Wednesday (they were playing Beethoven Emperor Concerto and Brahms 3rd Symphony...AMAZING concert!). I will say that David did not exaggerate in his description. After accidentally heading in completely the wrong direction out of Liverpool St, I eventually made it to the Barbican, where I met Vince. We talked for about an hour and a half before the concert, and then went to a really fantastic French restaurant for a late dinner when the concert had finished. It's definitely one of the best nights I've had since I've been here! I'm quite glad it worked out.

Work has been uneventful for the last few days, but I'm super excited to be heading up to Ireland this weekend! My friend John lives in Limerick, so I'm flying into Shannon tomorrow morning and taking Monday off (flying back Monday evening). On the agenda so far is a trip to Dublin, watching a rugby match in a pub (an IRISH pub!!), and John seeing if he can't finally convince me to get Twitter (updates as they become available...I'm making him work for it!).

There will be loads of pictures up after the weekend, hopefully! Until then.

No, I am not a Mechanical Engineering Intern

I have had the same conversation at least several times a week since I've been here. It starts innocently enough, usually with people asking my major.

I tell them it's Mechanical Engineering.

And, almost 100% of the time, they say something like "BT does Mechanical Engineering?" or "How are you fitting that in with what BT does?"

Well, the truth is, no, BT doesn't do a lot of MechE, and no, the courses I've taken in my major are not immediately relevant to my work this summer. I'm doing User Interface (UI) design, which is unlike anything I've ever done before. The fact that people's first reaction is confusion when I tell them this concerns me, not just from a personal annoyance perspective, but from an industrial perspective. We are well past the days of Engineers sitting in cubicles at the same company their whole lives, working on their own individual projects for 8 hours a day until retirement. People obviously value outside opinions and advice (consulting industry, anyone?), and yet the gut reaction I still encounter when I explain that I'm a mechanical engineering major who does cognitive science research and is spending the summer doing UI design is "why?"

I would like to think I bring a lot to the table by doing something I've never done before. There's some thrill in diving headlong into a whole new area you know nothing about. It's that thrill that makes me creative and productive, and it's what you often don't see in "turn-the-crank" engineers who have been working the same "stable" job for 20-30 years. I would like to think I'm the kind of person who can learn quickly, and who can learn to do almost anything. I think industry should move past putting people in boxes based on their major or theoretical area of expertise and start throwing them into situations and areas they've never seen and saying "go."

The reaction I want when I tell people that I'm not just sitting around doing mechanical engineering this summer is "awesome!" Because that's exactly what it is.

A non-work-related trip to Cambridge

Jia-Yan, a Cambridge alum, has been promising to give me the insider's tour of Cambridge. Today, I finally took her up on it.

I had not believed that Jia-Yan did everything last minute until she slid into her seat on the train (quite out of breath) literally 30 seconds before it pulled out of the station. Impressive. We had a nice girl-bonding session the train ride up. The weather today was lovely as promised (a bit hot, but at least no rain), so the day was full of potential.

Stop #1 was the Engineering Centre [sic], where Jia-Yan showed me all her old haunts. We worked for about an hour on the Solar Car (Jia is still a member of the team) outside in the lovely sun, where I kept insisting that lying in the grass is more fun than sanding (which it is, but needless to say I wasn't invited to come back and work on the car again). Plus we spent about half our "work" time on an ice-cream run for the rest of the team (I was fine with this). 

Stop #2 was meeting up with Jia-Yan's (and now my) friend Talia, an MIT alum who just finished her first year of postgrad at Cambridge in materials (she was course 3 at MIT). We ended up at an Italian restaurant near the centre [sic] of Cambridge, where we sat at a table served by a man who puts the wait in waiter. We passed the time by building a heinously unstable tower of all our water glasses (balanced on a stack of one-pound coins). This was probably a horrible idea, but it was more fun than sitting around huffily commenting on how effing long it was taking to get the check.

Talia had to go after dinner/gelato, so we went and met up with Jia-Yan's friend AJ, who did CME the same year as Jia and is actually going to be starting his PhD next year at MIT in course 14 (economics). It was really nice to hang out with someone who wasn't course 6. After a brief jaunt we found a place that was renting out punts (it's hard to get a punt after 5PM here, unless you're specifically going night punting, and plus May Balls are on so it's hard to get punts from the colleges). For those of you who are unfamiliar with punting (and not in the MIT sense), "punts" are small boats you take on the Cam (the river that runs through Cambridge). They are propelled by a long stick that you use to push off the bottom of the Cam (which is really shallow). This makes them very hard to steer, but it's still fun! I punted for most of the trip, and apparently was quite good for my first time ("But I keep running into things" I insisted, "But you run into things less than most beginners," AJ and Jia said encouragingly). 

After about half an hour of punting Jia-Yan and I literally sprinted to the train station to catch the last train from Cambridge to Ipswich. On the ride back, we proceeded to have the nerdiest conversation ever about relationships (if you don't like control systems and/or are male, you might want to skip the next section):

Jia-Yan: I feel like I'm the only one who ever analyzes things. I mean, I know why I feel what I feel. Guys feel stuff but they never think about WHY!

Me: OMG, I know. It's like they're a black-box and they have the input and the output but they don't even CARE about finding the transfer function.

Jia-Yan: The data's there, but you have to guess the transfer function.

Me: I know, it's like guys just keep generating Bode plots but it's usually not good enough to get anything useful.

Jia-Yan: And there's no feedback.

Me: Yeah, I wish guys had closed-loop transfer functions.

Jia-Yan: That's why they're so unstable.

Me: I wish making relationships work were as easy as being like "ok, you need to add a lag compensator ASAP."

Jia-Yan: That would be nice. 

Me (degenerating into pun mode): Yeah, I think we all have a lot to GAIN from that kind of analysis...

*ensue groan-fest*

My inner nerd is satiated for the time being.

Pictures are up on facebook!

Fun with Sports and other Misc. Activities

If you're not a die-hard fan of the MIT women's rugby team, you might not know much about this lovely sport. I certainly didn't. But, thanks to a wonderful game of "touch" rugby this week, I can summarize pretty well: it hurts.

Rugby, at least to an uninformed American, seems to be pretty much as popular as football (aka soccer for those who choose to call a game wherein most of the time you don't touch the ball with your feet "football") over here. The rules are pretty counterintuitive though...especially the part where you're not allowed to pass the ball forward (I'm not making this up). You are, however, allowed to express levels of violence rarely found outside of inner-city gang beatings. Awesome! (if you're the tackler and not the tacklee, I guess). 

I found all this out when I was invited to play a game of touch rugby (aka "girly rugby" for those who particularly enjoy broken bones and dislocated joints) on Tuesday afternoon. The idea is that a "tackle" is touching someone with both hands below the waist (I subsequently have a theory that touch rugby was, indeed, invented by girls). The good news is, you rarely get tackled. The bad news is that someone running into you full speed in an attempt to grab your legs still hurts...a lot. Also, rugby is a LOT of running around, so the whole out-of-shape lot of us were more or less knackered after about 20 minutes of playing (I would point out that the teams were also very, very unfair). At that point we sort of retired to kicking the rugby ball around the field and attempting handstands (or epic handstand wipeouts, in my case). 

I've also joined the gym here at BT, since I'm in one of my phases where I attempt to acquire non-negligible levels of upper-body strength (this has yet to work out for me, incidentally). More impressively, I've actually been GOING to the gym two or three times a week (in the past I have somehow tried to get in shape via having a gym membership, which may not have been the best strategy). If I've acquired any extra muscle in the last week, however, I doubt I would notice since I can no longer move my arms (some combination of working out a few times this week and playing squash for the first time in two weeks yesterday). I quite literally had to roll out of bed this morning since I couldn't actually sit up.

BBC Weather has predicted a warm and sunny weekend, so I'm a bit nervous (that is if the correlation of BBC Weather being wrong about 100% of the time holds out). I've got plans to go to Primark with Jia-Yan (who has all the qualifications of a good shopping buddy...namely being female and wanting to go shopping with me) tomorrow and then to go up to Cambridge with her on Sunday (Jia-Yan is a Cambridge alum who did CME, so we get on quite well, and she's going to show me around Cambridge a little more). I mostly plan on nursing my sore muscles via moving as little as possible. 

In other news, I successfully drove John's new Mazda on a PUBLIC ROAD! And I didn't crash it! And I made it all the way up to 4th gear shifting with my left hand! Whooooo!!! Next step: roundabouts *shudder*

Linguistic observation of the day:

The British drop "that" at the end of some statements. For instance, if I said "Should I go to the store?" your typical British person would say "you could do"...not "you could" or "you could do that." I have almost seamlessly incorporated this new phrase-ology into my vocabulary, but am somewhat disappointed with how little notice it has received from my British friends ("you don't say that in America?" they ask, puzzled, when I insist they recognize my drastically improved linguistic skills). Usually I get lauded for things like the correct use of the word "football" or saying "loo," but somehow I am the only one who has noticed this difference between British and American English...how strange.

Next week I'm going to Birmingham to visit Aaron Sloman, a big name in Cog. Sci. and AI...I'm SO excited! I also have plans to go hear the LSO on Wednesday, so I'm super excited for that as well! I'm trying to plan my long weekend in either Paris or Rome, so if anyone has any ideas which I should pick either way (ahh, Paris so temptingly close...) let me know. 

Till next time.

I wish I had something really exciting and thrilling to title this blog post but I don't

The title says it all, more or less. This weekend was very relaxing and fun, and really utterly ordinary except for the part where I'm in England, making it thrilling for, well, me.

BBC Weather, everyone's favorite weather guru, predicted a harsh weekend of "heavy rain," so I didn't make plans accordingly. Imagine my surprise when I woke up Saturday morning (yes, I did manage to get up before noon) to find that it was...sunny? My reaction was appropriately British in that I immediately got really angry (BBC Weather had been wrong! Therefore depriving me of the opportunity to make exciting plans to do god-knows-what! "Typical!" I exclaimed to myself, British-ly). After frantically emailing a few people, Josh, John, and I had loosely stitched together a plan to meet up for lunch, after which Josh and I would get groceries and go to his house to make a barbecue, where John would meet us later. 

After lunch, Josh decided to take a "quick trip" to Primark to buy sunglasses. Primark is a huge clothing store filled with trendy and incredibly cheap clothes. Josh should have known better than to take a girl on a "quick trip" to a clothing store. About an hour later, however, I had come to the conclusion that British stores suffer from the same misconceptions about clothing styles that American stores do (that being that all women are either 6 feet tall and anorexic or 4 feet tall and morbidly obese). Not wanting to torture the male contingent of our party further, I agreed to come back a different weekend.

Because it was (shockingly) still nice out, I convinced Josh to buy all the BBQ fixings while I went for a run. The good news is that I know Ipswich well enough at this point to find my way back from more or less anywhere. The bad news is that not all streets necessarily have connecting streets at regular intervals that point in the right direction. I ended up running for a good half-mile down a road looking for the next right turn that wasn't a cul-de-sac before I finally gave up and went back the way I came. Silly curvy English streets.

After I got back, Josh picked me up and we went to his house to bake a cheesecake. While, ultimately, it didn't turn out disastrously, neither Josh nor I are particularly good at reading printed directions, so we had a few unfortunate misunderstandings ("oh, you're only supposed to put the 200mL in and not the whole container?" and "let cool for EIGHT HOURS?! Are they CRAZY?!" being among the utterances). Minus the questionable half-cooled cheesecake, though, the BBQ turned out to be a huge success, especially after it turned into a impromptu dance-party in the kitchen (Josh has portable disco lighting!). At one point, a slow song came on, and I jokingly told everyone to get their lighters out. Oli (one of the BT grads) got his iPhone out instead. I joked that someone should make a "lighter" iPhone app that people could wave at concerts. A few minutes of searching later, we all found out that someone had, indeed, made such an app. "The best 57P I've ever spent," said Oli. 

Things started winding down around midnight, when someone had the brilliant idea to go to a nightclub. One taxi ride (and me forgetting my ID and having to flirt my way into the club) later, we all ended up at Liquid, which is apparently the best nightclub in Ipswich (I mean that's kind of like saying it's the best nightclub in rural Montana as far as the UK is concerned, but it was still way better than US clubs). 

The next day, I woke up to rain pounding down outside. BBC Weather had finally been right, but I was still pissed off. I stayed pissed off just long enough to go back to sleep until 3PM, which was wonderful. By the time I had woke up, the weather had cleared, so I convinced John to take his new Mazda out for a drive to Felixstowe, the closest beach-side town. We wandered around the beach for about an hour, which was very pretty, and then head home. The rest of the day was uneventful.

Work is still going well, and I've got some cool trips and events lined up for the next few weeks. Check out pictures from the weekend on facebook!