Day 3

Stat Mech: Continued to talk about the 1-d chain of harmonic oscillators - the crystal. Expanded into 3d... some boltzman equation that he's quite ingenious to have come up with.

Math 301: More complex integration.

Marketting: we went over some ads and how they were addressing certain ingrained 'needs'... from physiological (food) to social and status (diamonds). One ad was of note: it was a chevy ad with shadows of their minivans on a tub aproaching a drain with water coming out of the faucet. Our lecturer then calmly proceeds to tell us that it's some reference to being able to stop on slippery surfaces. The whole class bursts out laughing, no one believes that's what they intend. In fine print near the bottom, it was exactly that intention phrased.

Waveguides/Photonics: talked about how a laser works... went only so far as describing fabry-perot cavities. So, now I've done them in 3-4 classes. Huzzah.

APSC 459: had a lecturer who was an eng phys alumni. Talked a lot about company management items - quite good information though a little redundant with stuff I've learned in other classes. I.e. opportunity cost and supply/demand curves. Then talked a bit with Jeff about the phase locking project we're working on.

Had a midterm in Quantum. Four questions. The first three, I did in ~15-20min; they weren't a challenge at all - I didn't even need to study. The last one was a farce. They tried to place an LC circuit into a QM model but didn't really give you enough information on how to go about it. At least I got the right frequency and mass equivalents.

Finished the night off with my first Tango lesson. I picked it up really easily and I have to say, I love it. I still find it akward to dance with a lot of the girls because so many of them lack any sort of confidence. It's fine to laugh at yourself failing but don't assume you are.

Day 2

Don't have much time to post - quantum midterm tomorrow. Did some work for apsc 459, reread some of the physics. Apsc 262 had the first student presentation (not by someone who's 'supervising' the class) and it went pretty well. It was about sanitation and specifically examining a bio-filtration system. Got a drink with Chris at the gallery and talked a lot about EWB to feedback, optimism/pessimism and introversion/extroversion. Went to salsa and it was fine. Oh, and I lost my wallet today. Awesome. K, QM awaits.

Day 1

I got up earlier than I would on any normal day. I crammed for another hour or so before heading to class with the following class sporting a midterm. In stat mech, we reviewed turning micro states into entropy and deriving macroscopic quantities of them. We then modelled a 1-d oscillating crystal.

The math 301 midterm wasn't too bad but I didn't get enough practice in with vortices. Read: none. There weren't any practice problems involving them. The last question was tricky too since you had three branch points and had to find a way for them to cancel outside |z| = 1 with all roots on |z|=1. I just argued by symmetry they all had to point to the center - we'll see how that goes.

Marketing was another mind wandering class. We talked about getting statistics for marketing strategies including types of stats and some emphasis on focus groups. At least we get to watch marketing oriented movies/shows/clips in the class to break up the monotony.

Waveguides and photonics: went over a problem set. Huzzah.

We discussed free particles in quantum. Essentially plane waves that require an envelope to describe a proper position. More analogies to optics/fourier analysis. More review... though it's an interesting reminder that the dispersion relation between the group and phase velocities are such that the group is twice the phase. In optics it's almost always the other way around.

I'm a little worried about a development with my 459 project. Apparently, an RF cable we were using for our setup has been reclaimed by the group we were borrowing it from. We have to order another one and this will set us back a week.

The only other thing of note has been how shitty it's been for Matt in the last few days. He's being royally screwed with WEC, the residential musical (organizing the band), midterms and finally having a relative die. My heart's with you man.

Out. I'll work on comedy in the future.

Mission Statement

I've grown a lot in the past few years. Since high school, I've endeavoured to be more social - and I've mostly pulled it off. I gained a lot of confidence for those first few years, had some tumultuous times but have come out for the better. I've started to volunteer more for various activities and have been able to have more fun in general. I love where I am right now but I still think there are places where I can improve. I'm going to use this blog to improve myself. First, I'm going to address a bit of a discipline matter. I'm going to force myself to write to this blog everyday (excluding weekends, those are optional) . Furthermore, I'm going to describe what happened to me that day... I find whenever people ask me what's going on, I draw a blank. I don't really see the importance of my days events - they bore me for the most part. However, I think that's a perception problem on my part. So, I will post about the day and try to make it interesting. As my friends, I ask for your feedback. I'll still try to keep things concise, of course, because rambling is just as boring as saying nothing.

Last night, I went out to Koerner's Pub. I had intended to go to the Gallery and watch some amateur comedians cope with their self-confidence problems but plans changed. A friend changed her mind and the comedy show was replaced by some random live band as a fundraiser. We were going to go to the Ag. Sci beer garden but as I showed up in advance, the police had crashed and were monitoring the fire code for occupants - so I booked it to Koerner's.

It was more of the same there amongst my friends - dead convo, playing pool/shuffleboard the entire night. My sister enlightened me that I am as much to blame for the dead convo - hence trying to improve my storytelling skills. The night did prove a bit interesting as I met some guys from SFU who were here for a composer symposium or some other multisyllabic title. Had a game of pool with them - in which I almost won but scratched on the 8-ball. Later on in the evening, as they were about to leave, they asked me a bit of what I did. After I jostled around and dodged the question for a bit, I told them I'm studying Engineering Physics. They asked me some of the courses I'm studying to which in the end, I mentioned quantum mechanics. They continued to ask me specific questions about what quantum mechanics is and I proceeded the tell them about some basic postulates of QM. I ended up using analogies to stringed instruments to talk about stationary states - harmonics and tension being the 'potential' in a harmonic oscillator. Afterwards, we said our goodbyes and went our separate ways.

Title Reference

It's been a while since I've posted. If any of my friends still read this - rather, if any of my friends checks randomly if I've posted, thanks.

There's too much to tell to give a superficial update on my life. Instead, I wanted to actually talk about some content.

I've recently started school again and I'm taking a course, APSC 262 - Tech in Society or something like that. It's a separate section that's done as a student directed seminar; we have no specific instructor, just fellow students who facilitate the class. It's like an honours discussion without a TA or honours students... except me ;)

Anyway, the course is amazing. It's been a while, being an engineer, to actually discuss problems without predefined answers prescribed by mathematics and physics. It's a little disheartening to find such ignorance among some of the students but it's a breath of fresh air to know some people who can talk a bit more about ethics, responsibility, etc on more than a superficial level.

I guess I'll get to the point as well as the title for this post, referencing my blog's title. I chose 'hedonistic altruism' more as a lark - a juxtaposition of words that amused me. I think I had in the back of my mind some deep rooted social commentary that I didn't really explore back then. This class has now given me some ammunition. Let's just get started with some examples and see if you can find the theme.

Engineers Without Boarders: They raise funds from across Canada to send some engineering students each year to Africa to help implement technology and publicize engineering.

First class case study quotes:
"Women having to work long hours; get up before sunrise and work well into dusk."
"Children having to huddle around the one light in the village for two hours during night to study."
"64% of the population lives on less than $2 a day."

Second class discussion:
We were asked to define "Appropriate Technology" alone, then get into groups and combine our brainstorming into one concise sentence. I couldn't brainstorm but instead just came up with this definition myself, "Tech that people can apply that reflects their education, resource and economic status." The group basically decides to go with my definition but really want to add environmentalism - which I strongly disagreed with.

So, can you figure out what they all had in common?

It was all an appeal to your emotions. EWB, while I completely support in principle, is a romanticized idea. Any 'without boarders' is appealing to helping through self-sacrifice but it's mostly a publicity medium. You want to be romantic about it? Go ahead... but why waste money on advertising that you are?

The quotes all appeal to your sensitivity to issues. These reports never mention the populace; never men. It's always the children with flies around their mouths and protruding bellies. It's always about the women who have to walk 10km for water. The $2 a day statistic is also particularly damning considering how impossible it is to accurately reflect living standards there and here. To be fair, they do try to normalize it but there's tons of error and far too many variables to properly construct an index. It's a direct appeal to your pity.

The last discussion reflects the ever growing popularity of being politically correct. Is it really relevant to someone who is starving that a grove of trees that could otherwise provide them food/shelter/etc stays intact for the environmental concerns of the future? For fuck's sake, if we care about the environment, we need to start in developed/near-developed nations that actually contribute to global climate change.

All of these are contributors to Hedonistic Altruism. We do these selfless acts of charity not to actually make these people's lives better but to make ourselves feel better. We trick ourselves into thinking it's okay that we're destroying the earth with our consumption as long as we give some of our wealth away to solve superficial problems.

I should clarify what I mean by superficial. There are, of course, countless individuals who are making a difference and I by no means mean to take it away from them. However, most people I talk to only pay lip-service attention to detail as far as a global mentality is concerned. One case study that we were to read before class discussed how engineers had come in many cases and build elaborate water devices that fell into disrepair because the populace didn't have the means to repair them. Another discussed how other engineers created a low-tech solution but still missed the primary reason why the area suffers from disease. It's not enough to provide clean water but to provide proper education with regards to sanitation. Either way, my point is that these engineers really felt great about themselves - as do the millions of people who just think giving a small penance of their cash away will truly alleviate poverty in developing nations - as do a significant portion of my peers who think by claiming moral superiority by saying 'you guys should not be like us; take care of your environment' feel better about themselves.

All I'm saying is that it's hypocritical to take these stances and everyone really needs to stop taking a lot of problems at face value. Am I immune? Absolutely not. I basically forgot about the needs of sanitation because I take it for granted. Even though I have recognized nearly a decade ago as a youth that the greatest contribution to health has never been something by a researcher or doctor but by an engineer: the sewer system.

I'll try to clean up my thoughts more at some other point because this is actually quite important to me... maybe even write an essay that's much more coherent. Bed time otherwise though.