Last Day of Classes

[soid]

 The classes have ended; next is final papers and exams. I've been writing the Middle East paper 3-4 pages per day. Need 16 pages by Friday. It's been going pretty well; perhaps, maintaining consistency of the argument becomes more difficult with more pages. Cross-checking the books, then I find myself reading various passages, finding second meaning. What great books. My paper is about Iran and Saudi Arabia, oil and religion, and how the two sharing so much in common got into so different places. Also, reading Mamdani's "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim" – that is a wow book; I don't really need to read it now, but it's been very inspirational for my writing, so I read a couple of pages from time to time for a break. 

Not been thinking much of topology lately. Finished the last homework yesterday, but skipped a proof of one of the steps of Fundamental Theorem of Algebra: that all roots lie within a ball B^2; as opposed to existence of at least one root that lies in the ball; if the sum of absolute coefficients <1. I couldn't figure it out within 30-40 minutes; and one homework score is dropped anyway, and my other homework got above 90%, so that's fine. But still bothers me. Also, somehow, I got above 100% on the second midterm (including extra credit), so this lets me set my mind on other things for the moment. Feeling suspicious about the final exam: that's going to be 3 hours long and might include some head scratching. I'll enjoy it anyway. Still, I wanna sit down and think through what the hell happened in this class this semester – it's all none-trivial – maybe write "a story of topology", a bird's-eye view. 

Last thing is the NLG class (Natural Language Generation). That's been neglected despite being a highly interesting (and trendy) topic. The class was low in energy, and part of it was its structure: all the PhDs running their own projects very tangentially related to the papers that we had read. Though it was interesting to read a whole bunch of paper on the topic this semester, and discuss them in class. Another thing is my project being just sucky. I didn't come to love it. So, I'll just have to describe my sucky project in the final paper; not going to try to inflate its importance. That's the plan by Sunday.

What else? Got fever over the weekend, I was sure I caught Covid again during this fun times; but no, got better next day. Not sure what that was. Maybe I just didn't sleep enough. The weather is getting colder, but still no snow. I'm ready for white Christmas, but it seems white Christmas in New York is only in movies. Ukraine on my mind all the time: waking up checking the news, falling asleep – checking the news. And nothing happens, it seems, but still, so much anxiety. 

The picture is from Prof. Rashid Khalidi's last class. That's been a great time. No slides; sometimes he would spell some foreign terms on the board; just he, speaking from over the lectern; us, often raising hands and asking questions – there was a lot of energy in this class.

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

An interesting combination you had this semester, history, topology, NLG.

[soid]

Heavy reading, head scratching with a paper and pencil, head scratching with a code editor – it's good to be switching between the three.