Ep. 4: The Plot Thickens

Notes from the 30th of January-5th of February

As we leave January behind, the month of so much discovery and novelty, it is fair to say that the meaty part of the semester as officially been reached. Being nearly a quarter of the way through the 16-week term, the comforts of syllabus week and review material has well and truly been shed, leaving behind the terrifying beast of engineering topics that vex me to no end. For the most part, at least. My unit on Artificial Intelligence is proceeding smoothly, so much so that I have developed an unimaginable habit of nodding off during the afternoon lectures twice a week for it. Not great, but this all content so far that I have been exposed to previously, so I'm not reaching for the caffeine shots just yet.

The unit that has me in fits is the one I forecasted as being such, the one on integrated circuit analysis and design. The lecturer Saeed has grown on me, with his very softly-spoken manner and super cringey jokes¹, but the material is just very dense, convoluted and ambiguous, the latter mostly emerging from the fact that coming up with concise mathematical models for these devices is essentially impossible and so a paraphernalia of approximations and rules of thumb are employed which are useful for those knowledgeable in the field, but make little sense to a novice like me.

By way of example, here is one of the questions from our most recent homework:

Now, to be fair, Saeed maintains consistent office hours and he will essentially give you all the steps to complete these problems if probed, but at face value I am often finding myself unable to make heads or tails of this.

I have tragically been still plagued by my hacking cough throughout this entire week, and suffice to say that without improvement I will likely pay a visit to the student health centre to see if they can give me anything for it. I am pretty ambivalent though about making use of any American healthcare, despite having the approved Purdue health insurance, because I readily imagine the cost of even a basic inhaler to be eyewatering. To my absolute shock, I have still succeeded against all odds in meeting some new people and strengthening ties with those relationships already existing despite the weird glances I get with the cough. This week there was a career fair running on Tuesday which I decided to miss, with this being but one of the reasons. The other being I was in stitches looking at all the kids walking around in their suits carrying their resumés safely ensconced in an expensive looking leather pouch. Not for me!

On Those Rivals From Bloomington, IN

Saturday afternoon marked the first of two matchups in conference play between Purdue and Indiana University. It is safe to say that I have never been a part of such a big sporting rivalry in my life. Seemingly the entire state tunes in to watch whenever these two schools meet. This particular encounter was an away game over at Assembly Hall, and by most reports students were rocking up to watch some 3-4 hours before tip. Given that Purdue was #1 in the country at the time, and since IU was also ranked, the stakes were absolutely massive, and you felt that this particular encounter was taking on a life wholly of its own.

Purdue Athletics put on a watch party for students down at Mackey Arena, and even getting there 60 minutes before the game started, the line to get in wrapped essentially around the entire stadium. Some couple thousand of us filed our way in there, with free food on offer no less. This number was slightly inflated by the fact that there was a chance for students to win a Golden Ticket for the Paint Crew in 2023-24. These golden tickets and the associated passes you can purchase give you a (free) ticket to each of the home games for the next basketball season and are highly coveted items as you can imagine. In fact, there were more of these boarding passes handed out when the women's team played IU on Sunday at Mackey Arena and the lines were so big, so overbearing that a few people fainted and ambulances had to be called. Yikes. Read more about that incident here.

In any case, energy was high for the men's encounter, but it was not to be unfortunately. Despite being number 1, we went in as underdogs due to the seismic nature of the contest. A poor first half meant that even with a strong surge through the latter parts of the second, the comeback was too little too late. With that, Purdue suffered their first loss in some two months and their first since I had been on campus.

After the game, the Men's wrestling team had a fixture against Nebraska quite literally 50 metres away in the gymnasium, so I stopped by there to take in a sport which frankly I have no understanding of, outside of that one South Park episode about it. I ended up asking some people nearby who seemed to know what was going on (pictured below) and they were able to at least explain some of the basics. By the end, I was still very perplexed by the whole ordeal, but had a little grasp of how the scoring worked. A pretty fun conclusion to the day though, and was nice to see Purdue have some athletic success.

On Sports

On Climbing

Way back in Year 10 as part of an outdoor activities program at school I went rock-climbing each week in the city with some friends for a term. Since then, I have thoroughly enjoyed going climbing or bouldering (climbing without ropes) on occasion, though have routinely been left feeling as if there is a lot more to be unlocked there by a more serious commitment to the sport. Admittedly, the financial barrier to entry is relatively high, with memberships to climbing gyms costing at least what a standard gym membership would, and so opportunities remained scarce. The beauty of the Co-Rec here at Purdue though as I flagged in Week 0 is they have both top-rope climbing and bouldering. What a blessing! This week (and now going forwards) I've gone three times, each session being about 60 minutes or so before my hands are blistered and my forearms feel like they might pop.

I really hope that with consistency I can build up strength in my arms. The other aspect of climbing which I have utterly neglected at all times is the associated technique, because brute force will not be enough after certain points. There is a lot to be learned in this regard, though thankfully the other students who man the climbing walls are very generous in sharing their knowledge and passion for the sport.

In order to use the top-rope wall, you need only show up when the gym is not too busy and one of the staff their will tie you into the wall and belay. However, I ended up taking a $10 course where they teach you how to become belay-certified which ended up proving very valuable. For one, I gained a finer appreciation of the art of climbing itself, but two, it means that I can belay for other people (and very likely they will reciprocate), making it easier to get more climbs in as well as meet knew people.

I had to take a belay test after this course to get my little certification card, and tragically I failed, butchering the double figure-8 knot used to tie in the climber and incorrectly clipping in my karabiner to my harness when belaying. Fortunately, it is something you can do as many times as you wish, and I have since passed this test.

On Jiu Jitsu

Sometime during the middle of 2022 I finally enacted on an interest that I had for some while in martial arts and took my first Brazilian Jiu Jitsu class at a local MMA gym. With a looming exchange, along with a few injuries, I never ended up registering there and taking the practice seriously, however despite this setback I still maintained an eagerness to begin again when the opportunity arose. Fortuitously, there is a really strong BJJ club here at Purdue, and with only having to pay $30 for the entire semester it was a no brainer to start going.

There are two 3-hour sessions a week and it's safe to say that I've been loving it so far. The first few lessons were fairly claustrophobic, with limited mat space and an influx of newbies like myself wanting to try it out, but now a few weeks in, the numbers have begun to thin out nicely.

Jiu jitsu as a martial art is quite modern and involves a lot of grappling and submission work - there is no striking. For someone who considers themselves to be in pretty good shape, there are few things I've ever done that have fatigued me in such a short period of time as rolling (the name for grappling with someone in a semi-competitive fashion). After mere minutes, I am sweating profusely and absolutely gassed.

The appeal of the practice though has grown and grown. Not only have I begun to become friendly with many of the other guys attending, but I am still very much in that honeymoon period of a new skill where improvements come thick and fast.

On Basketball

Another intention I had before coming over to Purdue was to rediscover a passion for basketball that I had felt waning slightly in recent years. And what better place to do it. Beyond watching the varsity teams play, the near dozen courts available for free use in the Co-Rec should serve as a strong incentive to get out and play as much as I can. Of course, training by oneself is one matter, playing competitively another, so I had a sharp eye out for opportunities to participate in some rec-league type setting. That opportunity presented itself in the form of intramural sport, though sadly to register properly I had to form a team of 7+ and clearly in the first week of being there, this was nigh impossible. Instead, I elected to nominate myself as a free agent to the Men's Black (the more competitive division) league in the hopes of someone picking me up to fill numbers on their roster. This was back in week 2, so I had sat, and waited. And waited. Until I thought surely nothing would come of it.

Until, on Sunday evening whilst having dinner, I got a message from one of the teams asking me to play for them that night at 11pm. Now, despite how late the tip-off was, I was pretty eager to take the opportunity. Registering officially onto the team was a bit of a last-minute ordeal, but eventually I found my new teammates - The Purdue Latinos: 6 guys from Central America, and me. Safe to say I was culturally right at home...

At any rate, they were a really friendly group of guys, and we managed to pull out a victory in our 2nd seeding game. The standard was not outrageously high, but good enough to be enjoyable, and certainly I've heard of some teams that are going to absolutely pillage us if we happen to play them.

On Career Changes

On Tuesday night I attended the first round in a series of undergraduate seminars on physics research topics that some upper-classmen have conducted in the last year or so. The first was on The Evolution of Free Particles in Curved Spacetime and the second on Quantum Graph Products.

The former was hideously outside of my comfort zone, yet I was still able to pick up some useful bits of information with my minimal knowledge of classical mechanics. To summarise, if I asked you what the shape of the universe was, most would likely say that it is flat, stretching in every direction as far as you can hope to reach. The reality is that this is one of the most important open questions in physics, and its resolution would be of paramount importance into gaining further insight into the origins and future of everything. Contrary to being flat, it is just as likely, if not probable, that the universe is curved in some fashion, such as resembling a sphere, torus or saddle.

In a curved spacetime, space as we know it is no longer infinite in the traditional sense, and it would be possible to arrive back at where you started if you traveled in a straight line for a long enough period of time (which would be a really long time). And it turns out that depending on the curvature of spacetime, matter in particular settings will behave in unexpected and potentially revealing manners...fascinating stuff.

The second was much more within my wheelhouse as it dealt with particular types of graphs, a subject I had taken only last semester at university. One common question to ask with graphs (a collection of nodes and edges) is how many colours are required to give each vertex a colour such that no two connected vertices share the same colour. The smallest such number of colours is called the chromatic number of a graph.

The above graph has chromatic number 4, because it has what is called a clique of size 3 (a triangle of connected vertices, e.g. $a, b, d$). In general, the size of the largest clique drives up the chromatic number. The bad news is that there are some horribly behaved graphs such as Hadamard graphs whose chromatic number grows exponentially on the number of vertices. This is bad news for a number of reasons. However, the driving point of this lecture was about how there are these things called quantum graphs which are armed with particular properties, and the chromatic numbers of quantum graphs are <Highlight text="exponentially smaller than those of their "normal" graph counterparts" />. Again, fascinating stuff.

The point I really want to make here is that walking out of those lectures, I was absorbed in this feeling I often have from time to time where I fantasize about how much fun it would have been if I had elected to study maths and physics at university, rather than engineering. Be it after watching a lecture like this, or watching a video by the likes of 3Blue1Brown, there is the swelling of strong emotion owing I suspect to the beauty and elegance of the material being presented here. I absolutely love it.

Footnotes