Passing Quals!

A few weeks ago, on January 25th 2016, I passed my qualifying exams! This means that I am now qualified to write my thesis and get my PhD. Passing quals involved a lot of reading; during January I was reading pretty much 5 papers per day: [Read More]

Installing 64-bit Panda3D for Python 2.7 on OS X

I use the Panda3D video game engine to develop experiments for my research. I needed to install a development version that included some bugfixes, but unfortunately, installing Panda3D on OSX is not the easiest task to accomplish. The development builds they provide are unfortunately only 32-bit, but I needed to... [Read More]

Switching to Octopress

As you may be able to tell, the look of this site has drastically changed. I’ve been meaning to overhaul the theme for a while, and I decided I also wanted to try something different from Wordpress. In particular, I wanted more flexibility with embedding code, which Octopress seems to... [Read More]

Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs

I’ve been using Emacs () as my primary text editor for several years now. It takes some getting used to – the keyboard shortcuts are completely different from what you’re probably familiar with, e.g. Ctrl-C for copy and Ctrl-V for paste. Despite the somewhat steep initial learning curve, however, I... [Read More]

A Brief Update, and Why Numpy is Awesome

Wow, things are crazy. Classes and the rest of my responsibilities have hit like a tidal wave, and I finally am able to start swimming towards the surface to get some air. I’m only taking 3.5 classes this term, but I’m also working on my awesome UROP 15-20 hours a... [Read More]
Tags: numpy python

Karl Taylor Compton Prize

This year, SIPB won the Karl Taylor Compton prize, which is the highest award that MIT bestows to students or student groups! I and some other folks went to the awards convocation to receive it from President Hockfield: [Read More]
Tags: MIT SIPB

SIPB's CPW

Every year, MIT holds a “campus preview weekend” (CPW) for the prefrosh to come see MIT and hopefully be enticed to come here next fall. Of course, this means that all the student groups and living groups busily scramble to throw awesome events, and hopefully recruit some of the prefrosh.... [Read More]
Tags: MIT SIPB

Hackasaurus Rex

This past weekend, SIPB held a hackathon (an event where people come and work on various computer projects). SIPB, the Student Information Processing Board, is the student group at MIT in which I am most heavily involved. SIPB is essentially MIT’s computer club, and I had the honor of being... [Read More]

Rustic Change Purse

Here’s a pattern that I came up with, for a piece I’ve titled “Rustic Change Purse”. It’s a nice little change purse and is pretty sturdy. So far I’m very happy with it! I made it over Christmas break while I snowed in back home in VA because I got... [Read More]
Tags: knitting