For Honor!

As of last night, Olin has a new Honor Code.

About a year ago, the student body voted to put a sunset clause on the Honor Code, largely because a lot of people felt disconnected from the code. So this year, we elected an Honor Code Revew/Rewrite Committee (HCRC). They held a lot of meetings throughout the year, starting with ideation and comments on the old Honor Code, and then they went through a lot of drafts and got comments on those drafts. At one point the committee taped copies of the old Honor Code and the proposed Honor Code to the door of every single room in both dorms -- and then sent a meeting request to the entire school to discuss the draft.

Last night's Town Hall Meeting was the result of all of that work. In order to vote, we needed quorum -- at least half of the student body. We ended up with about 205 of the 325-ish students living on campus. After two hours of presentations, discussions, and voting, we approved the new Core Values and removed the sunset clause.

The new Core Values are below the fold:

Beavers Baseball

I'm from a baseball family. My father umpires high school and college ball, and I've been watching baseball on tv and in person for as long as I can remember (I definitely remember games in the Houston Astrodome). So when I found out that Babson has a baseball team and that the field is closer to Olin's campus than it is to the rest of Babson, I was very excited. And yesterday was opening day!

The game was at Babson's field, but Worcester Polytechnic (WPI) was the home team, which made the scoreboard a little confusing. The scoreboard lists "Visitor" and "Babson," but yesterday the "Visitor" score was Babson's and the "Babson" score was WPI. And Babson won, 19-6!

The Visitor score is actually Babson's. Hooray Beavers!

Reasons I love Math

1. Different subfields connect to each other in awesome ways. I'm doing graph theory research this semester with a group on campus. Most of my graph theory experience is in one subfield (edge coloring), and the group does work in another subfield (vertex labeling). Within my first couple of weeks with the group, we solved a vertex labeling problem by changing it to an edge coloring problem and solving that, which I thought was really cool.

2. It explains weird phenomena. This past Saturday night was the first ever Midnight Mathematicians at which the speaker was a professor. Midnight Math meets every other Saturday night (ish) at 11:59 pm, and we all dress classily, eat cheese, and listen to someone talk about math! This weekend, Professor John Geddes talked about work he's done on nonlinear dynamics of fluids, particularly related to blood flowing in microvessels. The blood sometimes does weird things, like change directions with no change in conditions, and the mathematics can actually explain this, which is so awesome. (I in no way mean to imply that math is only cool if it is useful. I've done and enjoyed too much model theory and logic to think that.)

3. And finally, it leads to exchanges like this:
(In Partial Differential Equations on Friday, talking about the wave equation on the half line. Aaron is the professor.)
Student: "That's why we can't make a semi-infinite guitar!"
Aaron: "That's why we wouldn't want to. The finiteness of the universe is why we can't."

Looking Ahead

Four weeks into this semester, we're already thinking about registration for fall classes.

This past week, all the students received a list of the classes that Olin is planning to offer in the fall along with descriptions of any new or highlighted courses. On Wednesday during lunch, the faculty held a course fair. Each type of class had a table -- Math, Science, AHS, E! (entrepreneurship), and each engineering. At least one faculty member teaching a class in that category was at each table to talk to students about the various courses and open research positions.

Between the course fair and Sunday night, all the students are highly encouraged to fill out a survey where we list up to five courses we'd like to take. The class schedule will be based on the survey results. The schedule will be released in a few weeks, we'll have some time to think about it, then we'll all need to get clearance from our advisors to register. That usually involves a short conversation talking about the classes we want/need to take.

After that, registration!

Snow-covered Olin

There was a blizzard last weekend! We got two or two and a half feet of snow. It was by far the most snow we've gotten this winter, and also the best snow for snowball fights!

The Student Activites Committe sponsored a snowball fight!

To get around, we walked through trenches that came up above my knees. Pictures below the fold!

Traditional

My second semester at Olin started two weeks ago. I have a pretty traditional schedule this semester, which is a little odd after the fall. I'm taking Real World Measurements, Modern Biology, Partial Differential Equations, and Physics of Waves. Despite how traditional most of my classes seem from the titles, they're still very Olin-ish, just in different ways than my classes last semester were. The classes have each met several times now, so I'm going to go through each one below the fold.

A Strange New Universe

"Out of nothing I have created a strange new universe."
-- János Bolyai

This past weekend was the MIT Mystery Hunt.

Mystery Hunt is a very large puzzle hunt. It's a little hard to describe puzzle hunts, but basically they're themed events in which teams compete by solving all kinds of puzzles. The answers to puzzles are always words or phrases (answers from this year's Hunt include DANNY OCEAN, GRAPHS, and AVENGERS), but how to arrive at that answer varies wildly. Most puzzles have two phases, a data-mining phase and an extraction phase. The data-mining phase could be answering the clues of a crossword or cryptic, identifying the missing letter on a bunch of road signs, looking at the rhyme scheme of a poem, doing some logic puzzles -- there are lots of possibilities. Extraction is getting from the data-mining to the answer. That could be indexing numbers into some words (taking the nth letter), looking at first letters of words, continuing a pattern, or looking at specially marked portions of a grid. A puzzle can be anything from a crossword with certain boxes marked so that those letters spell out the answer to a webpage full of pictures with no instructions at all.