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Tonight I played Clue. I’ve always liked it a lot, though I’ve never played it very frequently. I was really proud of the notation method I used today, and I think that with a few tweaks it would be really superior. I’ll outline what I did, a few observations, and what I plan to do next time.

What I did

I put X’s in the boxes for the cards I had. When anyone made a “suggestion”, I marked in a second column their first initial and how many guesses they had now made. In a third column, I wrote down the initial of everyone who said they could not help the guesser (in the rows guessed). When someone did show a card, I marked the first column (with the X’s for my cards) a small initial of the person who showed, in each row guessed. When I was shown a card (or when I definitively deduced what card was shown) I put a big initial of that card’s holder in that same first column. When I was pretty sure someone had a card, I circled the small initial in the box.

That’s it. It was a little clumsy and inefficient in some ways, but I won. Here are some observations:

Observations

• The most important thing you can know (apart from knowing that someone has a card) is who doesn’t have that card. Therefore the most important thing to keep track of is who says they can’t help the guesser. You can ultimately figure out who has a card when this list gets up to one less than the number of people playing.
• Ideally, you’d keep in mind each person’s progression of guesses, so you could see the patterns and thus figure out what they’d been shown last time they guessed. But I think that’s too much for the little piece of paper. If you’re not doing that, keeping track of which number guess a person is on is labor-intensive and inefficient.
• Obviously, when you know someone is guessing two things that they hold, and someone shows them something, you know what card was shown. But even if you can’t do that, it’s still good to keep track of when someone shows. If someone shows frequently when one card is guessed, you can have a pretty good idea that they have that card. This is of course a rough guess unless you also make sure that that card is not being guessed in conjunction with another on those occasions, and even then it’s less than 100%. But most of the assumptions I made based on this panned out.

What I’m going to do next time

The same thing, except without the numbers (which wasted time), and with a special focus on who doesn’t have certain cards. I won this time partly because two people before me accused incorrectly, but I think having a good system like this can’t hurt your chances. Anyone have a better system, or comments on this one?

This weekend I supplemented the completion of my first major assignment for school with attendance at the Honk! Festival in Somerville. Honk! is a festival of activist street bands from around the country, held annually in Davis Square in Somerville. On Friday, bands played in bars and other venues around the city (I didn’t see any that day). Saturday is the main day, with bands playing from noon until 9pm in hour-long blocks at six venues in and around Davis. Sunday there was a parade down from Davis Square to Harvard Square (which I missed because I was writing a paper), followed by a concert in the evening at the Somerville Theater back in Davis. The whole thing was spectacular, with wonderful weather. I knew I had a friend in the Rude Mechanical Orchestra from Brooklyn, but turns out one of my classmates is also in Factory Seconds from Somerville. I saw numerous friends from all areas of life wandering through Saturday’s crowds, enjoying the raw energy and cacophonous brass & drums throughout the day. Some of my favorite experiences were with What Cheer? from Providence and Minor Mishap of Austin, TX, watching from a tree as the Second Line Social Aid & Pleasure Society Brass Band performed at the opening ceremonies, and dancing with my classmates in a packed crowd to the Rude Mechanical Orchestra. I also enjoyed Extraordinary Rendition, also of Providence. I want to learn trumpet or trombone now!

I greatly enjoyed the festival, and am interested in getting more involved next year. One of the friends I saw meandering through the crowd was not only volunteering, but was hosting one of the bands at her house. Sounds like fun!

I’ve had a whirlwind of homework and commitments the past few weeks, and I’m leaving Boston for the fourth weekend in a row tonight. On top of that, one of the core readings of the semester is due on Monday for my Foundations class, and it’s 88 pages of dense text. So, you’d think this morning when I don’t have class, I should be reading. Well, you’d be correct. Instead, though, I worked a little on my job as UEP website manager, and spent more than an hour on a fun project:

Being new to this whole cooking-for-myself thing, I realized that I didn’t know off the top of my head the ingredients for pancakes. So I browsed the internet, writing down simple pancake recipes from the top three or four pages of the Google search result. I put the results into an Excel spreadsheet (as I love to do) and crunched numbers to come up with a educated average. Here’s what I came up with:

• 1 cup flour
• 1 cup milk
• 1 egg
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1.5 tablespoons melted butter
• 1 tablespoon sugar (or honey, in my case)

How’d they turn out? Fluffy! I will probably cut the baking powder in half next time, or drop it entirely. Historically, I’ve also lathered maple syrup onto my pancakes, but now that I’m buying it for myself, and seeing how expensive it is, I’m much more judicious. That will take some getting used to as well. Perhaps more honey, or an experiment with fresh fruit, will be necessary.

Do you have perfect pancake recipes? How well do they sync up with this one? Is there anything that you find especially important in the cooking process that I might be ignoring?

On Saturday I went on a tour of Boston focused on environmental justice with other UEP first-years. One of the second-years who organized the tour wrote about it on the UEP blog here. I was tired and hungry throughout the tour, but it was an eye-opening experience. I went on the East Boston part of the tour, and seeing the redeveloped (and not) housing projects was something I’d never done before. It’s useful to get out and see on-the-ground impacts of good and bad planning, to deepen the education you get at a university-on-the-hill. It seems my program is aware of that, which I am glad of.

Tomorrow classes begin! My classes consist of three core courses and one elective. The three cores are “Cities in Space, Place, and Time” (a history of cities, which I have tomorrow afternoon), “Foundations of Policy & Planning”, and “Economics for Policy & Planning”. I would like my elective to be “Developing Sustainable Communities”, but I am on the waitlist and I am unsure whether or not I will be able to take it. The contingency plan is to take “Social Welfare Policy”, which also meets on Tuesdays.

This afternoon I’m going bike shopping! And my housemate, a German economics post-doc at Harvard Kennedy School, just moved in, so it’s nice getting to know him as well. I hope your Labor Day is relaxing and helps you decrease your stress load as we enter the autumn.

Yesterday I moved to Cambridge, to start grad school and live on my own for the first time. I’m not too worried, but it’s exhilarating and frightening. I will have a lot of reading to do, once classes start on Tuesday. But the moving process was efficient and exciting and everything went according to plan.

My dad drove me with all my stuff from Amherst to Cambridge, where we arrived around 10:30am. We hit some heavy traffic on Route 2 in Concord, so we turned off to take smaller roads through Lincoln and Belmont. There was no traffic on those roads, it was much prettier, and we got the desperately needed bathroom break as well! Good decision.

I couldn’t move into my apartment until the evening, so I had gotten a friend’s permission to stash my stuff in her apartment during the day. I found her place, stored my stuff, and moved it out again without a hitch.

During the afternoon, I went to the matriculation ceremony, which was one of the best assemblies I’ve ever been to. All of the administrative speakers (especially Tufts President Larry Bacow) were interesting, informal, and devoid of the condescension that is so frustrating about high school and undergraduate mandatory auditorium events. I high-tailed it from the event to run two errands. First, I wanted to check whether I could still get a discounted MBTA semester pass. I found the right person to ask, but unfortunately I missed the MBTA-imposed deadline. Then I went to University Police in order to get my ID. Due to poor phrasing on the graduate student orientation materials, it had seemed like Tuesday was a fine time to do this, but the “Campus Po-Po” (as we sometimes called them at Conn) had not planned for the rush and were stressed out. After a little while, the one guy running the ID booth walked out and told the assembled queue that we’d have to come back tomorrow or the next day, when they had planned to dispense the IDs. The crowd mostly dispersed, but I lingered with a few people, and another Police dude gave us the non-stressed-out version of that ultimatum: they needed to move the cameras and printer, but if we’d uploaded pictures already he could print out IDs from a different printer. I thanked him. Unfortunately, though, I had an addition ID snafu. Because I’d been working for my department over the summer, apparently I was still in the system as a “Non-Tufts Hourly Student Employee” instead of a graduate student, so that’s what printed on my ID card (though “employee” got cut off). The nice Police man didn’t know how to rectify the problem in the database, though, so he advised I hold onto this ID for now and return for a new one next week after the rush had subsided.

Aside from those adventures, it’s been a quiet spell of purchasing necessary items (Seventh Generation products FTW!…that’s “for the win” to you older readers. Just pretend I said “are great!”) and acclimatizing. The 98 degree weather doesn’t help, but it’s summer and that’s the way the temperature should be occasionally. This morning I tried out my new routine of wake-run-shower-breakfast-tea. I’m excited about that, though I think I will switch breakfast and shower temporarily to give myself time to stop sweating before I shower.

Finally, I would like to keep posting here on a once-a-week schedule, but I’m not sure whether I will have time for that or not. I’m optimistic, but I am going to have a lot of reading to do, and I am not a fast reader. So I hope you’ve enjoyed what I’ve written thus far, and I hope that you enjoy what I continue to write just as much!

Google just released a staggering new feature to Gmail: the ability to make free phone calls to any real phone in the country from your computer. At least for people like me who are online a fair portion of the time, this changes everything in the area of telephones. It’s really, really cool.

But then I remembered: wasn’t Google just in the news recently about something else? And wasn’t that piece of news that they were cheating on their users with a telephone company? The news (in case you missed it) was that Google and Verizon announced a deal whereby Verizon could fast-track some content to your browser (if the creators of the content pay up), leaving other content to languish at slower download speeds. It’s a deal that’s been universally panned as directly transgressing net neutrality. See the video below for more information.

“Can you hear me now?” is Verizon’s ubiquitous ad campaign, whereas “Don’t Be Evil” is Google’s corporate motto. If you’re concerned about the prospects of this deal, go to SaveTheInternet.com and sign their petition! There’s also a video there of Al Franken explaining net neutrality in a less shouty tone. Or if you’re scornful of petitions, get involved in a bigger way! Put your time where your ethics are.

Anyways, the phone-in-your-inbox thing that Google just came out with is fantastic, but I am very suspicious that it’s causally linked to their deal with Verizon. And if this fantastic new bauble was intended to make us forget our recent outcry at Google’s corporate misbehavior, it may have worked, temporarily. But let’s be adults, too. Learn about net neutrality, and remember on Election Day. It’s the actual current battlefront in the fight for freedom of speech.

One of my big interests over the time that I’ve been keeping this blog is how to live a better, more fulfilling life. I figure, if I get a lot of that figured out when I’m 24, the benefits will be greater than if I just let the wisdom trickle in over the course of my life. So I’ve been collecting proverbs and reading about happiness and lifestyle design, and the process has been fulfilling in its own right.

But though I might treat them with reverence, the proverbs and maxims I collect are more ground rules than they are Rules. That is, they suggest a path, and what’s important is not that they are followed to a T, but rather that you let them guide you gently. It’s okay to break the rules sometimes. A couple rules I’ve felt good about breaking recently:

• Live in the moment. I am currently at an idyllic camp, where for a minimal amount of work I can play games much of the time, eat wonderful food, swim in a lake, and breathe in lovely ocean-infused and pine-cleansed air. But I’m also extremely excited about seeing my sweetheart in the near future, starting my graduate program, and moving to Boston in three short weeks. While I’m enjoying my present surroundings, I’m also full to brimming with anticipation, and I feel like that’s okay.
• Don’t procrastinate on your personal goals. Shouldn’t I be reading more? Going running? Practicing my calling? I probably should be. But I was just on the go for months and months, having once-in-a-lifetime experiences. It’s okay to relax now and not push myself. It’s important to take breaks, too.

Putting a ground rule aside for a little while doesn’t invalidate it. I’m curious, though: what are some of the ground rules you try to live by?

I’m a nascent transit geek, so one of the coolest things for me about visiting so many cities around the continent was comparing the transit systems in each. I’ll attempt to give a brief overview here of my thoughts on each.

New York City

The only transit I took in New York was the subway which I’ve taken multiple times before. Judgment is always clouded by familiarity, but generally the New York subway works pretty well. Trains come pretty regularly (though occasionally I’ve had to wait longer than I’d like) and the fare system makes sense to me. In case you’ve never used it, New York has these paper “Metrocard” tickets, which you swipe upon entering the turnstiles. The one complaint I have about the New York subway is that it’s dirty and smelly and noisy. The stations are kind of icky to wait in. But considering how well the system works otherwise, I really don’t mind. Slightly more frequent trains are the only other suggestion I have.

Washington, DC

From my previous visits to the capital, I had positive impressions of the metro there. This time, though, I had a lot of confusion buying my ticket from the machines. DC has a paper ticket system similar to New York, though apparently it also has the “proximity cards” I’m familiar with from Boston. According to Wikipedia, the Washington Metro is the second busiest in the country after New York. I believe, though, that the New York system only requires swiping upon initial entry, whereas the DC system requires swiping upon exit as well. It’s more convenient to only have to swipe once, but other than that, I think the Washington Metro is pretty good.

Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh has no subway system, instead relying heavily on buses. You pay in cash, mostly, and the fare is based on how far you are going (how many zones you’re traveling through). Some times of day you pay when boarding the bus, other times you pay when getting off. I figured it out eventually, but this sort of system is one of the most difficult for visitors to decipher, I believe.

Chicago

The L in Chicago is the second-largest rapid transit system in the country, and has similar efficiency and ease to #1, New York. Downtown many of the lines are elevated, hence “The L”. While it’s necessary to switch lines to get to some of the close suburbs during much of the day (I was going to and from Evanston), the stations are very clean, and the day passes I used worked just fine. Upon first entering an L station, I was confused about how to proceed, but a very friendly transit worker helped me out, telling me where I could buy day passes at a nearby convenience store. One trip I took from Hyde Park back to Evanston late one night took well in excess of an hour, but that’s to be expected going from one side of a city to the other on multiple lines. And it’s great that the L has good late-night coverage.

Vancouver, BC

I only took one bus in Vancouver, though that one was very clean and intuitive (if late), and had many easily-recognizable sheltered bus stops. What impressed me the most about Vancouver was its infrastructure for bicycles. There are bike lanes on the majority of roads, and one of the primary tourist attractions (which I enthusiastically engaged in) is circumnavigating the bike path around Stanley Park. The coolest thing, though, is that Vancouver has streets that are designated as bike routes, and on these streets bicycles are the primary vehicle, with the few cars driving slowly and giving bikes a wide berth. Just read this quote from the city government’s website:

Expanding the bicycle network is an important strategy in the City’s effort to reduce traffic congestion and support a clean, green and healthy mode of transportation that can be an everyday choice for our citizens. Over the past 10 years, our bicycle network has more than doubled in size, and cycling is the fastest-growing type of transportation in the city.

They’re great. Enough said.

Seattle

I had trouble in Seattle. There is no subway, only buses which go underground in parts of downtown. There was no ticket vending machine on the platform I was catching the bus from; you purchase your ticket upstairs and outside before coming down the escalator. The vending machine itself was confusing, and the only option I could fine for the buses was to buy the five dollar Orca Card (similar to Boston’s CharlieCard). Then, because I was unsure and wanted to check my balance, I tapped the card on one of the kiosks scattered everywhere on the platform, thinking of the swipey machines in New York where you can check your Metrocard value. Unfortunately, these unlabeled machines deducted money from your card for the light rail system, which was also being heavily pushed in the interface of the ticket vending machines. I was flustered and displeased. After that initial trouble, the buses were all right, though. It would just be nice if such a sprawling city had something faster (like a subway) connecting it with its close suburbs.

Portland, OR

Portland’s city planning is three decades ahead of most other American cities, due to the power of its “Metro” planning board and the urban growth boundary mandated by the state. The ticket vending machine I used near the train station was incredibly intuitive and easy, and while I had to wait a bit for the buses, the entire time I was there they worked quite well. I wish I’d had reason to ride the MAX, Portland’s clean-looking light rail, but it was never the best way to get where I was going.

San Francisco

The Bay Area has several disjointed transit systems: the BART (subway), AC Transit & Muni (buses), and CalTrain (light rail). The biggest issue is that they’re all operated independently, meaning they aren’t synchronized and you can’t buy tickets or get information about all of them from the same place. Other than that, though, they all work all right. San Francisco is a big city, and the bus rides across it take a while, as does the BART ride under the bay. The CalTrain only runs once an hour, doesn’t accept debit cards in its ticket machines, and gives change in dollar coins. But other than those quibbles, the transit in the Bay Area is one of the better systems I used.

I didn’t use the transit in Denver, so that’s the extent of my reviews! Do you have similar or different experiences with these transit systems? If you care to, leave your comments below!

Greetings! I write to you from Pinewoods music and dance camp in Plymouth, Massachusetts! I am volunteering here for the rest of August, sometimes doing grounds and sometimes washing pots in the kitchen. I’d like to use this blog post to tell you a little about what it’s like here.

Throughout the summer, the programming at the camp is run by four different user groups: the Country Dance and Song Society (CDSS), the Country Dance Society – Boston Centre (CDS Boston); the Folk Arts Center of New England (FAC); and the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society (RSCDS). The majority of the summer is run by CDSS. Each week is a different thematic area of tradition. Folk Music Week just ended, and now it’s English Week. Next week is English & American Week.

Campers and staff live in cabins that have electricity but no internet or insulation. Three delicious meals a day are prepared by the kitchen crew, and there are lakes on both sides of camp where you can swim at all hours of the day. There is constantly music drifting through the trees from one source or many, and the escape from technological interference allows you to slow down and relax. It really is a utopia.

There are two main crew jobs: working in the kitchen and working on grounds. In the kitchen there are cooks, kitchen aides, one dish washer, and one pot washer. There are a dozen or so paid crew, and a number volunteers who fill in the gaps and provide days off. I’ve learned how to wash pots, and on some days I clean bathrooms or check cabins on changeover days. The crew are almost all college-age or just graduated; I am one of the oldest. The demographic of the campers ranges from week to week, but by and large the majority are retirement age or middle-aged, with some number of younger folks depending on the week.

I’m having a great time, getting to know the other crew members and playing lots of board games in my off time. I’m not getting paid, but I get free room and board for minimal work, and I get to be in this beautiful place with music and dancing and great people. Cleaning toilets in paradise.

Today I arrive at Pinewoods Music & Dance Camp, where I’m volunteering for five weeks. Because the camp is an idyllic utopia in the woods, there isn’t very profuse internet access. Therefore, I’m going to start blogging just once or twice a week rather than every day. I hope to return to my previous schedule when I leave camp at the end of August, but we’ll see. I hear grad school can be demanding.

Thank you for reading my blog so much, and I hope you’ll continue reading on this new schedule!