This World and Me

A notable cultural difference between the United States and Germany—which I had heard about and later confirmed when I visited Germany in the summer of 2016—is in our attitude towards flags. In the United States, flags are everywhere: in our schools, in our government buildings, in our post offices, sometimes displayed across people's houses. The Washington Monument ( pictured ) in Washington, D.C., has no less than 50 U.S. flags surrounding it, one for each U.S. state. In Germany, on the other hand, you will rarely ever see the black, red, and gold of the German flag in your everyday life. The Germans are much warier than Americans of excessive expressions of national pride—particularly because of their dark history with nationalism. Aside from major sporting events (where the Germans will go all out in support of their national team, flags included), I did not encounter in Germany nearly the same level of ubiquity that the American flag seems to enjoy here in the United States. ...

On Thursday, June 8, 2023, a lawyer by the name of Steven A. Schwartz stood with his head hung low— humiliated —before a federal judge in Manhattan. He was there to represent a man named Roberto Mata in his lawsuit against the airline Avianca. Schwartz had asked ChatGPT for past legal cases that could support his client's case against Avianca. ChatGPT cheerfully replied with case names like " Martinez v. Delta Air Lines , Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines and Varghese v. China Southern Airlines ," and—perhaps feeling a similar sense of cheerfulness at the sheer convenience of this newfangled online tool—Schwartz went ahead and cited these cases in the final document he submitted to the court. However, any such cheerfulness quickly dissipated, for if Schwartz had done any cursory examination of the cases provided by ChatGPT, he would have soon discovered that none were real. ChatGPT had made them all up. ChatGPT is a form of artificial intelligence. The term "artificial...

Song of the Week #12 is "RPG" by Sekai no Owari . Sekai no Owari is a Japanese pop band whose name translates to "End of the World". The band is so named because Fukase, the lead vocalist, was in a period of depression at the time he founded the band. He saw making music as the one thing left for him during a time that felt like the end of the world. I stumbled across Sekai no Owari because they once did a couple collaborations with the American musician Owl City. Anyone who has been a friend of mine for a while, or who has been a reader of this blog for a while, will know that I used to be quite into Owl City. (Owl City has not released new music since 2018, so my interests have since shifted, but it looks like he may be on track to release some more music in 2022.) In 2014, Sekai no Owari featured on an Owl City song called "Tokyo" , and in 2015, Owl City (under his real name Adam Young) was the producer of the Sekai no Owari song "Mr. Heartache...

Song of the Week #11 is "It's Not Living (If It's Not With You)" by The 1975. For a long time, I thought this was a love song. In my defense, there were several factors that misled me towards this incorrect conclusion. For starters, the song is on an album entitled A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships (2018). Additionally, the title of the song—"It's Not Living (If It's Not With You)"—gives the impression that it is about a person. To top it all off, the song sounds happy . If you fail to pay close attention to the lyrics (as I did), you might think it is one of the most upbeat songs on the entire album, if not the most upbeat-sounding song in The 1975's entire discography. It is all a clever deception. The song is about drugs. Specifically, "It's Not Living (If It's Not With You)" is about the former heroin addiction of The 1975's lead vocalist, Matty Healy, who co-wrote the song with fellow band members George Dan...

Song of the Week #10 is "Deine Nähe tut mir weh" by Revolverheld . When I first did this song of the week thing back in 2017, I wanted to avoid repeating artists. However, that immediately proved a futile endeavor. I have written about the German band Revolverheld no less than three times on this blog before now: check out my posts on "Das kann uns keiner nehmen" , "Ich lass für dich das Licht an" , and "Bands deiner Jugend" . All three are from the 2013 album Immer in Bewegung , and the song I discuss today—"Deine Nähe tut mir weh"—comes from the same album. In my view, Immer in Bewegung is quite the masterpiece within German pop music, and there is not a single song on the album I dislike. I got into Revolverheld after one of my German instructors in my freshman year of college introduced me to them. "Deine Nähe tut mir weh" is in German. The title of the song means "your closeness hurts me". The song starts with ...

Back in 2017, I published a series of blog posts that discussed one song every week. I had eight of these "Song of the Week" posts until I lost interest. I would like to resume the series. Song of the Week #9 is "Borealis" by Madeon . Released in 2019, "Borealis" is the last song on the Good Faith album. In my view, it is the spiritual successor to the landmark song "Shelter" by Madeon and Porter Robinson. I wrote about "Shelter" on this blog in May 2017. [Verse 1] A light from dark, In a land by the sea, Came from the sky. You'll be named after me. I discovered "Shelter" at a particularly timely moment in my life: when I was just about to leave my parents' house for the first time to attend college thousands of miles away. Whereas "Shelter" was a song about expressing appreciation for one's parents, "Borealis" is something of a reply from the parent to the child, who is named af...

In June 2020, I published a post on this blog that discusses onion routing , a method in computer networking whereby computers can send anonymous messages to one another. If I were an instructor at a school or university teaching about onion routing in some computer science class, I would demonstrate it to the class in the following way. Items needed Post-it notes or sheets of paper, one for every student in the class Envelopes, four for every student in the class The more students in the class, the better, but at minimum there needs to be five students . Goal Each student in the class, using the method demonstrated here, will be able to write an anonymous note to someone else in the class. The recipient of the note will not be able to determine who wrote them the note without convincing at least two other students in the room to reveal information. Procedure Preparation ( Optional ) Have every student in the class draw a name from a hat that has every student's name in it. The ...

Suppose you wake up in the morning one day, look at the clock, and see that it reads 7:00 AM—for this reason, you believe it is 7:00 AM. As a matter of fact, the time is 7:00 AM. Do you therefore know that the time is 7:00 AM? For millennia, philosophers have toyed with the question of what it means to know something: at what point do you not simply believe a proposition to be true, but also know it? One convincing answer used to be "justified true belief" (JTB). Here, the clock was a convincing justification for your belief that the time was 7:00 AM, and the belief was true because the time was indeed 7:00 AM. Because you had a justified true belief that the time was 7:00 AM, most philosophers before the 1960s would have probably agreed that you also knew that the time was 7:00 AM. In 1963, however, a man by the name of Edmund Gettier changed everything. Suppose that, unbeknownst to you, the clock is broken. It just happens to be stopped at 7:00 AM. However, by sheer ...

Applying for jobs is one of my least favorite activities, especially as a college student. The process forces you to confront failure, go outside of your comfort zone, and reflect on your strengths and weaknesses. It is not easy. Having been through the process a few times now, I would like to share what I think are the five most common mistakes that computer science students make when applying for entry-level software engineering roles (e.g. internships, new-grade full-time roles) and how to avoid them. #0: Underestimating the value of internships Before I proceed with explaining the five most common mistakes in the job application process, I should first mention that some students make the mistake of not applying to jobs at all while in college (e.g. thinking that they will have time to apply for jobs after they graduate). They are underestimating the value of jobs, especially internships. The easiest way to secure your first full-time tech-related job after college is to convert a j...

When you are a child, one year feels like a lifetime because it is your lifetime. When you are five years old, waiting one year for something means waiting a period of time equal to 20% of your entire life thus far. As we get older, this fraction shrinks. When you're twenty, waiting a year means waiting another 5% of your life so far. When you're forty, waiting another year means waiting another 2.5% of your life so far. Suddenly, the years seem to be whizzing by, and you wonder where all the time went. This simple mathematical thought process provides only a partial explanation for the common feeling among humans that time seems to be speeding up as we grow older. Another factor is memory. Children are constantly learning new things about the world they live in: how to talk, how to make friends, how to play games, how the world works. Our developing brains process all of this information and store it in the form of memories. When we become adults, we start to settle into a ro...

A few weeks ago, I moved to Seattle, Washington, where I now work a full-time job as a software engineer. This was the first time I ever moved somewhere permanently. Sure, I had technically moved to California in order to attend college, but while I was there, all of my important identity-related documents still had my Ohio address on file: my driver license, my vehicle registrations, my bank accounts, my credit cards, my voter registration. For the first time, I am now in the process of switching all of that between two different states. My experience has not been smooth. Although I didn't know it at the time, the trouble began on June 23, 2021—about six weeks before my arrival in Seattle. My parents had decided that they would gift me one of their cars, a gray 2016 Nissan Rogue, to use in Seattle. In order to reduce costs for my parents, they would split me off their auto insurance policy so that I could get my own, and we would transfer the car's title under my name, giving ...

One sunny day in 2018, I was walking home from class at UC Berkeley when I received a notification on my phone that almost made me trip on the sidewalk in surprise: it was a news article announcing that a federal judge had decided that the entirety of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (often shortened to just "the Affordable Care Act" or "ACA" or "Obamacare") was unconstitutional. How could this have happened? The Supreme Court of the United States had previously upheld the constitutionality of the ACA in 2012 in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sibelius , 567 U.S. 519 (often abbreviated to NFIB ), so it was unthinkable to me that some federal district judge six years later could decide otherwise. I was wrong. The Affordable Care Act is a complex piece of legislation that includes a plethora of different healthcare reforms. In my view, there are three key elements of the Act: Firstly, it required individual insuran...