Reviving Ye Olde Personal Home Page
Before TikTok, before Snapchat, before Instagram, before YouTube, before Facebook, before even blogs, there lived a different breed of social media: The personal home page. Your virtual homestead on the world wide web. A pit stop all of your own on the ever-under-construction information superhighway. A place to hang up your shingle as you made your way through the wilds of an untamed, untrammeled cyberspace. (Barlow’s Declaration accurately captures the spirit of that age).
The Side Effect Principle
Sometimes to get what you want, you can’t focus on getting what you want. You have to do something else, and then what you want happens all on its own as a side effect of your actual efforts. If you want to lose weight, don’t focus on losing weight: focus on eating healthy and exercising well; weight loss will happen as a side effect. If you want to find a spouse, don’t focus on finding a spouse: focus on becoming the best version of yourself; your future spouse will fall in love with you as a side effect.
And again: Hope
Every day we choose hope or despair. If we choose hope, even if the world has seemingly arrayed itself against us, we see the possibility of a new arrangement, of a path forward, of a solution, of a way of making things better, of making them how they are meant to be, of a hope for a better world. If we choose despair, all becomes silence and shadow. The world is at war with us and we are at war with the world.
The First Step to Learning
“What’s the NP in NP-Hard stand for?” April 2001, Orlando, Florida; the final round of a science fair for high school seniors. I had just finished my presentation about my research and gone into Q&A. One of the judges had asked me this question and was now awaiting my response, growing increasingly impatient as I didn’t answer. My mind raced. I knew what an NP-Hard problem was —my research dealt with one example of a NP-Hard problem: vehicle routing (think FedEx deliveries) — and, in the course of my presentation, I had explained what the NP-Hard class of problems involved.
On Human-to-Human Communication Protocols
People are amazing. Magical, even. I’m a science nerd, and I remember from my AI research days — back when we were looking to what the brain does so as to derive insights into how to make computers think — it was shocking to realize that we know so very little about what the brain does and how it does it. We’ve made enormous strides in the past half-century, but we’re still at the very beginning of human knowledge about human cognition.
Farewell to London
This week marks the end of my study abroad at the London School of Economics. London is the largest city that I’ve ever lived in. Public transportation here is, compared to my American experiences, a dream. The Tube, though pricey, runs (mostly) on time and is remarkably clean and quiet. It’s bit crowded during rush hour, but that’s to be expected. The cultural and historical experience of London is breathtaking. After visiting the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the British Museum, the British Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Westminster Abbey, the Churchill War Rooms, St.
A Theory of Recruitment
As an MBA2, I’ve gotten a lot of questions from MBA1s about “how can I get hired at company X?” or “how can I tailor my resume to improve my chances of getting a job at company Y?” These are the wrong questions. What do you want to do with your life and why? That’s the question to ask. Answer that question and all the other questions find answers too. But that’s a hard question, and one whose answer is different for each person.
The happiest people I know are those who serve
The happiest people I know are those who serve. Who put others before themselves. Who see their mission in life, not as a quest of endless self-aggrandizement, but as a journey of service to those they meet along the way. There is something different about living life through the lens of service. Those I know who live lives of service have a lightness — a joy — alive within them. It is there even when the service they perform is arduous.
Strive to be true to yourself
The best professors I’ve had are those who are not afraid to be themselves. They are unabashedly themselves. Rather than conform to some supposed vision of what it is to be a professor, they are authentically themselves. They are still professors — they still teach — but they do it in a way that is theirs. No one else could teach the way they do because the way they teach is inextricably bound up with who they are.