Stop stealing my stuff; my ever-increasing lowered belief in the average person's level of moral decency

Contents:

• The Story
• What to do differently?
• Recent history of crime
• I have a dream

The Story

Last night, my girlfriend and I left Oakland and headed to San Fran's Golden Gate Bridge.  Before heading out, we did our ritual:

• I stripped my wallet of its contents, only bringing ID and 1 credit card, in the event that it gets stolen
• Packed camera equipment in my non-descript hiking bag, as opposed to my obvious camera equipment bag -- to make myself less of a target
• Deliberately left 1 of my camera lenses at home, in case we get robbed I'll still have at least 1 good lens.
• She brought her mace key chain which was gifted to her by a friend as a "welcome to California" present

We are cautious with every step we take, warned by:

1. her roommate had recently been robbed at gunpoint at 10am
2. numerous similar stories from friends, wherein stabbings occurred

Everyone in The Bay seems to have a "when I got robbed" story.  Now, we have one too.

After seeing the golden gate bridge, we stopped at Burger King at 9pm for some grilled chicken.  It's by one of the main downtown subway stations which looks pretty ritzy and touristy in the daytime, but it's like a weird Cinderella story, for all of the daytime tourists magically turn into homeless people at sunset.  It's a very ghetto area.

Out of my peripheral, I saw 3 dudes waltz into the store.  One of them snuck up behind my girlfriend and hit her table w/ their hand.  We were confused what he just did, so we turned towards them, as if to say "What just happened?  Did you do something?"  They had turned away from us and were heading towards the exit while hiding their faces.

We instantly figured out that they must have stolen something.  Without knowing what it was, I grabbed/carried my camera equipment hiking bag in my right hand and sprinted down Market Street after them.  It was completely dark out, and I yelled "Thieves!  They stole my wallet!" in hopes others would help stop them.  I caught up with one of them as they split in a nearby park.  He looked 16-17 years old and said "I ain't got it" and patted his pockets to show.  I quickly left and started to pursue the other 2 but then realized I lost them in the crowd of vagrants which filled the park.  Passerbys then turned to me and offered to call 911 for help.

To make it worse, turns out, there were at least 7 nearby security guards and/or subway police officers (with cars) who offered no help during this, even though many of the store security guards watched me as I ran past their storefronts.  How could they not simply sack the thieves or make any attempt at all?  In Southeast Asia or Georgia, I feel there's definitely a higher chance someone would have done something.

Turns out, they stole my girlfriend's iPhone which was sitting on the table in front of her.

We called the cops 4 separate times, thinking Burger King's security camera would be useful.  To no avail, the police never showed up as we waited for them over an hour.

I am grateful though that 2 guys who witnessed this ordeal turned to me afterwards and immediately offered help by calling 911 on my behalf, helped pin down security guards (which unfortunately were of no use), and for walked back with me to Burger King as they cursed the thieves, lack of nearby help, and overall horrible crime problem.

What to do differently?

Sadly, SF police apparently never show up to thief incidents like these.  So, I keep replaying it in my head, wondering what I could have done differently.  I devoted 0 time to the one kid I caught up with.  Looking back, he was my only lead.  I couldn't have hit him:

• He looked 17ish, thus a minor
• I truly don't think he had the phone
• I had my expensive (25 lb) camera equipment bag in my right hand and wasn't even in a position to fight
• Most importantly, two wrongs don't make a right; more violence isn't the answer.  Violence is the problem.  Heck, even if if the above conditions were different and I did rough him up, that would likely make matters worse:
• His crew were likely watching me from the pool of vagrants 60 feet away (I didn't get a good look at their clothes and lost them in the bunch) and could have easily exacted revenge on me either there in the park are after following me back.
• Even if no harm happened to me, that would surely only further encourage the punks to carry knives and/or a gun -- being robbed via knife is a very common occurrence here already.

Recent history of crime

• August 27, 2013 (San Francisco): guys stole my girlfriend's iPhone

• June 1, 2013 (New Jersey): someone backed their car into mine in a residential parking lot, knocking out my headlight, denting car some, and didn't leave a note.

• December 23,  2012 (Boston Train Station): while washing my hands in the restroom, someone stole my messenger bag with laptop in it, despite my keeping and eye on it.  Sprinted out after them, security guards tracked him down and returned laptop.

• November 28, 2012 (Providence, RI): people broke into my apartment while I was away

• August, 2012 (Siem Reap, Cambodia): hotel staff stole my Kindle Fire from my luggage in room while I was away.

• May, 2012 (Boston): someone broke into my car, stole stereo, and stabbed the subwoofer because they were unable to remove it from my car

• February, 2012 (Boston): condo repairmen stole my GPS from my place while I wasn't home

I have a dream

You get the idea.  I've always been pretty minimal, but with these events, it's as if I have to be on guard of my items 24/7, yet most of these times there's nothing I could do to prevent it.  Having so many occurrences of thief definitely throws off one's concept of owning a product and oddly kind of reverses the stock one places in material possessions.

Imagine that you previously viewed semi-costly gadgets as being nothing too important, just a nice treat which if stolen is replaceable.  Yet, naturally over time, one starts to be on perpetual guard of any (e.g., one's wallet, phone, or laptop while in a library) out of necessity, or face being robbed.  This naturally then makes one redefine the stock placed on that material good.  It doesn't make me desire or love the item any more, it just creates an unhealthy level of awareness of having to protect your stuff.  One shouldn't have to worry about protecting everything and protecting themselves.

Since today is the 50th anniversary of MLK's speech, and since I'm currently staying on a street named after him, maybe it's suiting for me to proclaim a dream: I dream we could all live in a world/community where there was such an abundance of mutual trust, respect, and integrity that we wouldn't have to worry about petty thief, having to lock our homes at night, or having to buy security systems and insurance and on everything we have -- that we need not worry about the character of our neighbors, for we could rest assured and treat each other like our own brothers and sisters, as we live as if one big family.

Yea, the nature of humankind will never reach that equilibrium point, heh.  So, in the meantime, whenever I buy a house, I suppose it should just be a castle... with a moat.  And alligators.  And archmen.   Oh yea, and definitely a drawbridge for the moat.  It's not complete with a drawbridge.

Zeiss 100mm f2.0 ZE Makro-Planar: Initial Impressions

This summer, I treated myself to the Zeiss 100mm f2.0 ZE Makro-Planar Manual Focus lens.  This completes my "holy trinity" collection, as I have -- and absolutely love -- the Zeiss 25mm f2.0 and Zeiss 50mm f2.0, too.

As for my initial impressions of the lens:

Sharpness/Clarity:
It has state-of-the-art performance and is one of the sharpest lenses in the world.  This is one of the reason I was attracted to it.

For example, here is a photo that is completely unedited, sooc (straight-out-of-camera):

This image at full resolution is 5,616 x 3,744 pixels.

Did you happen to notice the bee in the center of the frame?

Just cropping the center, we get an idea of the sharpness of the lens:

I was roughly 5 feet away from the bee, yet without a tripod, I was able to get an in-focus shot which is clear enough to show tons of dust in the bee's wings!  This would even be a challenge for auto-focus lenses, especially in terms of yielding this level of clarity.

Color Rendition:
In short, I love the warm colors/temperatures that the Zeiss lenses tend to render.

Build:
The lens is entirely metal; no plastic, as is the case with all other Zeiss ZE and ZF lenses.  It feels like a tank and is heavier than Canon L series lenses.

Manual-Focus:
Aside from the price, for most people this is definitely the most off-putting feature of Zeiss ZE/ZF lenses.  I find that the lack of auto-focus makes photography more fun for me -- it makes me think about shots more, and it challenges me.  Sure, every once in a while I'll miss a shot, but I'm willing to make this sacrifice for all of the other benefits Zeiss lenses yield.

Nonetheless, I admit that this 100mm lens is more difficult to focus with than the Zeiss 25mm and Zeiss 50mm.  All 3 lenses have a very long throw, which is incredibly useful for manually focusing.  However, it's only due to the nature of the shots that makes the 100mm more difficult to focus properly.  For example, when shooting at 25mm, you are usually taking landscape photos.  Thus, it's easy to focus at infinity or near-infinity and have all of the landscape in focus.  At 50mm, you're often focusing on things up-close (a la macro shots) or landscapes -- pretty easy.  However, at 100mm, you're often focusing on things that are between 5 and 20 feet away, so you have a much smaller target/range for focusing properly.

Yet, the throw is buttery smooth, and it's enjoyable to use.  Plus, I've swapped out my internal focusing screen with the EG-S screen, which helps make focusing easier, and the Canon 5d Mark II allows for an focus-notification whereby the focus points light up and a beep will sound when I focus on something that is recognized as being in focus.  This helps a lot.

tl;dr
I love the Zeiss 100mm, it's insanely sharp, and I aim to use it much more than I was using my Canon 135mm f2.0L.

Digging through 11 years worth of backed-up computer files

I present to you some old, archived pictures from back in the day.  Yet, first is the back story:

Over the years, I've had many items stolen from me -- from my apartment being broken into, car broken into in LA and Boston, hostel staff in Cambodia, to dorm staff at MIT (yes, it was confirmed, and I was reimbursed).  I don't have many material possessions which would cause me to be upset if they were stolen, but one of them is my hard drives (i.e., my photos, videos, etc).

Photography is one of my biggest passions, and I go through great lengths to not only backup and organize on an OCD-like level, but I also even parannoyingly (paranoid + annoyingly) hide all of my external hard drives through my apartment, in the event that my place is broken into again.  By the next time I go to backup my files, it's usually like a nerdy Easter Egg hunt, as I've forgotten where I hid them.

I recently realized I've fortunately never lost any computer file ever since I started started college in 2002.  Yep, 11 years ago.  1.5 terabytes.  500,000 files.  19,000 folders.  It sounds nerdy, but since 2002 I have:

• every single photo I've ever taken -- 1st camera in 2005 (70,000 photos)
• every document I've ever typed (e.g., resume, draft of hand written love letters, journal entry, tax document, etc)
• every class assignment from every university I've attended (70 classes)
• every song I've ever downloaded
• every webpage I've ever made

Alas, after much deliberation, the organization is, as Outkast would say, so fresh and so clean clean.  Here's a glimpse into the 'pics' folder for 2012:

Having caved to the temptation to dig through my old photos and cringe-worthy text documents, I give you a sample:

Junior year at FIT (2005).  I look 13.

Junior year, I took my 1st flight ever.  Solo visited San Fran and Berkeley for Spring Break 2005.  Was getting world-renowned Stuart Russell to sign my AI book.  One's Spring Break doesn't get much wilder than that.

The SlackWear movement I created at FIT :-)

Hawaiian Luau at FIT (2005)

Hawaiian Luau at FIT (2005)

Olin, our engineering building at 2am (2006)

Pictured: Kazi.  We studied hard... (2006)

The signature sub for late night sessions (2006)

Good ol' Damian (2006)

Clearly not impressed with the sushi (2006)

All of us RAs.  Senior year, we've finally gone through puberty and are starting to look like proper to-be adults (2006)

I just wish I owned a camera before 2005.  This stuff is a goldmine.  And, despite how trivial some of the text files (e.g., notes, thoughts, letters) may seem, it's awesome to scan through some of the old stuff.  There are memories I had totally forgotten, moments of accomplishments, failures, happiness, and upsets that I can barely recall which at the time seemed so monumental, and they provide glimpses into a former self which has evidently slowly evolved over the years.

My point: backup everything!  Whether it's to the ever-elusive cloud or locally, imagine having such files when you have grand-kids.

A statistical approach to predicting my getting sick

During my recent trip to Iceland, I thought to myself how grateful I am that I haven't been sick, and that it's surprising because "it's about time I got sick again."  Days later, I randomly got sick (sore throat, constant 102 temp, coughing); I should be fine in 3 more days, though.  In the meantime, just for fun during the winter break, I decided to see if I can define some formalism for this supposed intuition.

Disclaimer: I know this is some rough, make-shift calculations, but given the nature of having so little data, and that the real, useful data is all immeasurable and not at my disposal, this is what you get :-)

I get a sore throat about 5 times each year -- which always lends me voiceless for about a week -- despite the fact that I:

• eat healthy
• workout regularly
• have good hygiene practices (shower at least once a day, brush teeth & floss twice a day, wash hands frequently, etc)
• have no known allergies or health issues (have seen several docs at MIT regarding this)

I've been tempted to just go to NYC and lick every bus pole and escalator handrail I can, in attempt to go ahead and get it over with by subjecting my body to every known bacteria and virus out there.

Obviously, there's a myriad of variables that can cause one to get sick:

• stress
• germs being spread from air, physical contact, etc
• weakened immune system (i.e., from over-training in the gym, stress, etc)

Clearly, these things are easily intertwined and impossible to accurately monitor and model.

However, in late 2007, I wanted to get to the bottom of it and was curious if there were any patterns in my getting sore throats.  So, for the past 5 years, I've quickly logged every time I get sick (a rating of the severity, how many days, and symptoms).

In the following picture, I plot every time I've gotten a sore throat, rounding to the closest week.

Looking at any patterns over time will only show possible correlations, not causes, I know.  Yet, the times I get sick are highly consistent from year to year:

• I pretty much always get sick on Jan 1
• I essentially never get sick from April 1 - July 31
• my sore throat always lasts exactly 6 or 7 days.
• I get sick roughly 5 times every year from August 1 - March 31.
• 100% of the times that I fly overseas, I either get sick while there or soon as I come back -- but it's not always sore throats.  Here, I'm only concerned with sore throats.

I will refer to August 1 - March 31 as the sick period/months, which spans 32 weeks.  For all calculations, we are only concerned with getting sick during the current sick period, and that each one is independent of the previous years'.

Again, since it's impossible to model the aforementioned variables that are the actual causes of getting sick, I figured why not play around with the time-series data and treat it as indications as to when I'll get sick.  So, here we are making the large assumption that all of the underlying sick-causes variables are consistent and uniformly distributed during the sick months, and that I get sick on average 5 times per sick period.  I think this is reasonably fair as a high-level approximation.

If we model my sickness as a Poisson distribution, we see that the probability of getting sick N number of times during a sick period is:

N	probability of getting sick N times
1	0.033689734995427
2	0.084224337488568
3	0.140373895814281
4	0.175467369767851
5	0.175467369767851
6	0.146222808139876
7	0.104444862957054
8	0.065278039348159
9	0.036265577415644
10	0.018132788707822

I like that distribution; it seems to fit my sickness history pretty well... although places a little too much weight on getting sick more than 5 times.

For each one of these possible outcomes (and including all N up to however many weeks we have left... not just N >= 10), there's a chance of getting sick next week, which is simply N/(# of weeks remaining).... again, assuming uniform distribution of everything, including the times I get sick within the sick period.

Further, if we wish to calculate the overall probability of getting sick next week (i.e., summed over each possible N), we simply combine these two things, and weight and normalize by the Poisson probabilities listed in the above table.

As a real life example, last week:

m = 13 (meaning 13 weeks left until March 31 aka end of 'sick period')

n = 2 (meaning I've been sick twice so far)

lambda = 5 (meaning on average I get sick 5 times each year)

Per the above equation, the probability of getting sick this week (which I did) was roughly 42.10%.

Further, if I did not get sick this week, the probability of getting sick the following week would be 45.43%

Further, not getting sick in the 2 upcoming weeks, but getting sick on the following would be 49.14%

Thus, the probability of NOT getting sick during the current week and upcoming 2 weeks was only 16%, which agrees with irking feeling I got: "sweet; I'm not sick... it's been a while though..." 

In the meantime, if anyone is down for my NYC-immunity-deplete-boost idea, let me know.  I'll let you go first as the guinea pig.

Brown is amazing

This week, I officially matriculated as a PhD student at Brown University.

For the past 6 years I've flirted with the idea of pursuing a PhD -- applied to a several schools back during my senior year of college in 2006.  Brown was actually one of those schools.  They rejected me.  As a shot in the dark, I casually sent them an informal email simply asking if I could be considered for their Master's program.  This was very unorthodoxed, as the Master's and PhD programs have separate applications and are examined differently by the admissions committee.  To my surprise, they replied 3 days later with the following opening line:

Dear Christopher,

Congratulations! On behalf of the Department of Computer Science, I'mdelighted to inform you that your application for admission to the Sc.M.program has been approved by this department.

However, I ended up enrolling at UCLA for my Master's.  The future communication I had with Brown would all prove to be equally impressive, genuine, and caring.

In short:

• my undergrad, Florida Tech, was a great school for me, as it served as the perfect stepping stone and challenged me appropriately as I developed foundations in Math and Computer Science.
• UCLA was great and very different from Florida Tech in every way: 40,000 students instead of 4,000.  More Olympic medals and NCAA championships than any other university.  Tons of crazy overachieving high schoolers who are all very diverse in their interests and talents.
• Brown seems to be the best of all worlds, as I briefly explain below.

Brown has the incredibly smart student body, world-class researchers, and over-achieving everybody.  However, the university is small (6,000 ugrads and 2,000 grads) and is within the quaint town of Providence, Rhode Island, which is like the smaller, like-able little brother of Boston.  Moreover, I've never witnessed such genuinely caring professors, staff, and students.  It really is like a tight-knit community, and in short, they do education right here.

Brown is consistently ranked as the #1 college in terms of happy students, and I can now see why.

There's an open-curriculum, where undergrads get to draft their own program.  No other major university in America has this [1].  Classes can be pass/fail if they want.  And surprisingly, the professors -- at least the ones I've had thus far -- are all excellent teachers, which is naturally rare amongst research universities.  Moreover, it is appears common for strangers to first ask you, "How do you like it here so far?" to which both parties then say, "I love it."  It's eerie how often this seems to happen.

I could ramble for a while about little situations that have risen thus far, and how it's been really cool and impressive.  However, I'll just conclude with two very small events that I encountered during my 3 days.  These events were tiny, but yielded a surprising "oh wow" response:

1. In my first Computational Biology class, the very energetic professor was giving motivation for studying the field and provided a very quick intro to biology.  In passing, and just an incidental part of one sentence, he stated, "by the way, just a few years ago, someone won the Nobel Prize in this area... oh yea, and he was a Brown undergrad here"
2. While walking across campus, I stumbled upon a building that had tons of students who were packed in (and even hanging around outside), as everyone watched some intense dancing.  I caught the latter half of some dramatic African dancing which included Bongo drums!  What a diverse and cool student body.

So, in short, my first week has been great.  I love Brown.

[1] http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/brown-university-3401

Things I'll miss and not miss about Boston

When I was a senior in high school, I got rejected from some colleges and heard that the valedictorian got rejected from MIT but accepted to Harvard.  I hadn't heard of MIT but at this time I decided to take education really seriously and that this MIT school would be my goal.  It was a childish goal, but that's how I first come to learn about MIT and Boston.

For spring break in 2006, during my senior year of college, I visited Boston with a great friend.  We enjoyed Boston a lot, which further attracted me.

In 2009, I finished my Master's at UCLA and happily accepted an Associate Staff position at MIT Lincoln Lab.  I moved to the heart of Boston -- the Beacon Hill neighborhood.

Now that I've been here for 3 years, I'm leaving for the next stage.

Things I'll miss about Boston:

• work: without going into specifics, the world-class researchers, resources (from computing to textbooks to journal libraries), and freedom have been phenomenal.  I still proclaim that MITLL is the #1 place in the world to work.

• personal relationships: words cannot express

• location:
• living 1 street from the #1 hospital in the nation
• living 1 street from the subway
• living 1 street from the charming Charles River and Longfellow Bridge
• living .8 mile from Boston Common (the oldest park in the nation)
• living 1 subway stop from MIT, where I can see doctors for medical things
• 10-minute drive to Logan Airport (international airport)

Little nuisances I WON'T miss about Boston:

• tiny/expensive apartment (approx $1,000/sq ft for buying)
• no cell phone reception (at home or at work)
• parking: 
• takes 10-20 minutes to find a parking spot by my apartment (sometimes upwards of 45 minutes or longer)
• must move car often due to street cleaning and whatnot.  on those days, you must move car by 7 or 8am.  if you fail to do so, your car will be towed.  luckily, i've avoided this for 3 years, but it surely involves a lot of effort to stay on top of the situation.
• cars get broken into.  mine did, and all i had visible was a cheap $100 after-market CD player installed.
• commute: 30-minutes to drive to work; 1 hr or more via public transportation
• rudeness: unspecific to Boston, large cities have enough people that there often exists at least a few really rude people in any large crowd, and that such rudeness has a platform for many to see.  unfortunately, i was a direct or indirect audience participant a few times.  oh, and driving in my car is like front-row seats for the show.  related, i'm convinced taxis have no brakes or turn signals.  oddly, they use the horn as a substitute.

I'm packin up and moving out in 1.5 weeks.  Bye bye, Boston!

The Great Safari - Day 1 (From Nairobi to Maasai Mara)

Last year, I went by myself on an African safari for 2 weeks with Good Earth Tours, Inc.  I'm finally going through the video.

Here is day 1 (please watch in 1080p):