This week, I’ve probably been more slammed than I ever have been before at Colby. Which is saying a lot, considering last week I slept like a grand total of ten hours. The only thing though is it isn’t as bad as it sounds: I love most of the classes I’m taking, and even though I’m up until 3, 4, or 5 AM each night, I’m having a ball. It’s one thing to be stressed and frustrated with a pile of work you don’t care about, but another to be putting in way more effort you need to into something that you love. Each night this week I’ve gone to bed feeling awesome about myself and having done some really cool stuff during the day. Those days, by the way, have consisted of me sending like 100 emails an hour, faxing things, making phone calls, living in either my professors office or in the Robotics Lab, and in general just being as busy as hell.
Some really cool things I’ve done this week: I made an hour and 15 minute long group presentation investigating the independent spending in the 2012 election. I focused on American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, Karl Rove’s Super PAC and 501(c)4, respectively. It was super cool and I kind of ran my group, sending out way too many emails and just in general feeling business like. I could write so much more on this but I’ll keep it simple. I really wish I could upload some of the schoolwork I do to show you guys: I have wicked cool powerpoints and CS projects.
Our first three slides:
My life, as usual, has also been consumed by CS. My project this week was making a simulation that was supposed to simulate a customer checking out in a store. It sounds simple, but it was actually really cool and had very relevant real world applications. I had customer “agents” that changed color depending on how many items they needed to check out with, people running the checkout counters who changed hues based on how stressed they were (how many customers they needed to get through their queue) and a lot of other things. Customers chose lines a bunch of different ways, one of which was picking two at random and then picking the shortest of those, which when we looked at standard deviation proved to be the best method. It sounds simple, but believe me there were thousands of lines of code that it took!
That was one of my pretty simple ones, I made it cooler and more complicated later on. Found this from a couple projects ago and thought I’d throw it in too: (it’s a simulation of bacteria warring each other)
If you think these are cool, you have no idea how awesome some of these projects turn out to be! I’ll definitely be showing you in the future. Anyways, back to work.
-Nick
