Thoughts on how should you perform in school, for one who's looking for a exciting life only

Why we go to school?
Because we want a successful life.
What's a successful life?
To be rich? To be full of wonderful experience? To be peaceful and happy? ...

Sometimes I am wonder, why am I in university? If I want to be rich, I can do it without a college diploma. Steve Jobs did it, Bill Gates did it, many entrepreneurs from China did it. And then there are enough people to ensure you these examples are just exceptions; and study shows that people with a college diploma made more money on average than those don't. Then I thought, exceptions only appear to those who believe them to be exception. To the second argument, I can only say that if the contrary is true, who the hell will spending $10k to torturing themselves for 4 years?!

So then, after a flush of light, I am in fourth year ready to graduate. I ask myself, what hell have I done in the last three years? Well, I've learnt some math, accounting, financial statements, "marketing" and "organization behaviour" etc. Ok? While I haven't done any real business. Then, I go ahead ask my father that question "why am I in University, while I believe I can pretty much learn these stuffs by myself if I really want to? And you know, if I really want to learn this it would be much more efficient!" Well, his answer was that "University is some where you can not only learn knowledge, it also gives you the environment and experience that lift your life-views and ideas." Honestly, this answer is somewhat satisfying to me now. It's just I didn't know how to interpret it until now, literally now, while I am writing this. As a smart student with tons of ideas and questions, it's not arrogant to say that I have pretty much come to understand how to excel a course. If you look at my marks, they are pretty good, and I am confident to say that if I want I can get A+ for every course I take. But the ultimate problem is, some times you just don't want to learn this shit, even though you know people are generally short sighted by nature and some course might be very helpful 5 years from now. This being said, shall I excel all my courses then? Hell no, the only reason why people want to excel at every course is the people want to get a secure job in the future, well, I have to say that is what most people want. But not me.

The one thing that I have learnt or I have been born with is the idea that life is full of possibilities and I can achieve anything if I believe in it and work hard. It's not fairy tail for me since I am not a child. Even keep this in mind, I still can escape the brain wash of the Chinese education system for the first 14 years of my life. So when I was 15 even though I am in Canada, I came to believe that I should excel every course I take. Ok that's fine, people learn from mistakes. So until one day, you realize that you are staying home brainlessly in the holiday season, because you have no life, because your life is dominated by the education system...

Things start to change, I start not only focusing on study but also on altitude. I start to see so many flaws and negative thoughts I have as a person. And then, I also see so many good things about myself that I didn't care before. Recently, I came to believe one thing that altitude is everything to your everyday experience - if you feel everyday is awful, most likely that's because your altitude is awful and you can improve it through efforts.

If you are looking for a exciting life instead of a secure job after graduate, you should probably start to spend some time on something you want to work on instead of trying to excel every course...

Yes, many things to do and many things need to be improved... to be continue

CSC236 SLOG #5

After another busy week, today is Nov 26. About a school week left until examine period and winter break.

Last two weeks lecture is on languages, and language of languages. It is quite interesting. When people talk about languages, we start thinking about history and anthropology which I had taken in my high school. From my point of view, exploring language on languages is a step toward artificial intelligence, because language is one of the magical things about human being. People use language to convey so many things - ideas, feelings, facts etc. And when two people try to say the same thing, the use of different languages can lead to two totally different results. Please forgive my wandering mind. Usually computer science people are considered nerds with disadvantage on social skills, in other words, language. At the same time, computer science people are so skillful with the computer languages including some language of languages. What a interesting contradiction!?

CSC236 SLOG#4

I did the second midterm on last Thursday, the questions were not what I was expected. I talked to some friends in the morning session, they were getting questions on Upper and Lower bounds and proving closed form. But we were tested on the correctness and master-theorem. However, since I did my review for all materials, I am able to do most of the questions. 

The correctness proof was not challenging for the most part except the proof for termination. I know how to proof the termination, it is just that I do not know which format I should use since we never do proof of termination in lecture formally.

The second question suppose to be easier, but I made some mistake there. In part a, the "b" for master theorem suppose to be 2, but I wrote 3. My reasoning was that - "b" represents the number of pieces we divide the problem into, since we divide the problem into three parts (two parts of n//2 and one part of n%2), I figured "b" is three then. However, I talked to the professor later, who suggested the last part is not valid because it only recurses once. 

But then I was thinking should "b" depends on wether the parts are recursive? In wk7's lecture, we did an example on multiply lots of bits. It occurs to me, there are four parts recursing in the recombined equation, but we got "b" equals 2. I will great appreciate if anyone can answer me what "b" really is? I guess I will need to ask professor about this since no one really looks my slog lol.

CSC236 SLOG #3

I have finished the assignment 2 on Friday. The assignment is not bad. When you really started working on it, it seemed much easier than the first time you read the questions. For me, the hardest thing in writing up the assignment was actually putting in the symbols and unusual parameters, such as ceilings, n_hat, theta etc. What I used to do was go to google, and search for "logical symbols". Then I would arrive to a wikipedia page, and I could copy-paste the symbols I need to my word file. However, I cannot find a copiable character for ceiling, floor, and n_hat. So, if any of you knows a way to get these notation into a word file or any text-editor, please let me know, it will be greatly appreciated.

I remember last week, I went to youtube and watched Vihart's videos about Fibonacci Sequences under prof. Heap's recommendation. It was fascinating. The videos talked about how plants and flowers naturally grow in a pattern that is basically Fibonacci Sequences or its alike. It looks like magic. Suddenly, you feel things are connected together. You realize that high-level math is not something that should be studied in another planet. I wish I could watch more videos like that that link math or conceptual stuff to our everyday lives. I hope the school teachers and professors could do this when they are teaching.