Sometimes I feel like writing a poem.

Cornell’s chimes ring loud and clear
Echoing with earnest might
Far below there’s cause to fear
For it’s Halloween tonight

Students decorate their dorms
Pumpkins yellow, candles bright
They go from place to place in swarms
For it’s Halloween tonight

Costumes of the strangest threads
Beasts and witches, ghosts of white
No one cares in what you tread
For it’s Halloween tonight

Bags of candy, tightly grasping
Something moves just to the right
There with friends, white-faced and gasping
Every human filled with fright

Houses, blasting music, shouting
Do these cold comrades invite
Escape is what they’re ever touting
For it’s Halloween tonight

Back at home, others are sleeping
Not worried by the lack of light
They know that dawn will end the creeping
Which somehow makes the shrieks alright

Looming there, upon the hill
Keeping watch from greatest height
Cornell’s chimes grow deathly still
On this Halloween’s one night

CS 280 (Computer Science — Discrete Math and its Applications) starts 2 hours and 20 minutes after the conclusion of Psych 101. This leaves plenty of time for lunch or last-minute reading/work.

It is rumored that the class was supposed to be instructed by Professor Graeme Bailey, who I’ve mentioned before. From what I gather, Bailey usually makes courses a lot more challenging than most other professors, but also much more interesting. I’m taking Music 165 with him, so I’ll have more to say on that later.

The actual professor is Professor Selman. He seems highly interested in the subject matter, and explains things clearly. He also has a sense of humor. The only thing missing is, perhaps, display of passion, but I’m quite satisfied overall. He also relies pretty heavily on PowerPoint.

The first few weeks were just about proving stuff. We reviewed predicates and quantifiers, rules of inference, and proof methods. Here is my Logic Rap, which I have created to assist others in learning the early material:

The Logic Rap

Marky-Mark and the Sweet Suite Gang

All statements must be declarative
Not interrogative or imperative
Work with all those connectives
Converse, inverse, contra-positive

Prepare to be taught tautologies
Based on premises
And some Q.E.D.s

Make me well-formed formulae
And we’ll see if I,
This proof, can verify

Okay, so maybe it’s not that helpful. In the past couple weeks, we covered some basics of set theory and did a boring review of functions (e.g., the definitions of one-to-one and stuff that most people in the class have already been taught several times over). It’s pretty cool stuff, but so far really intuitive and with lots of review. If you feel like checking out the lectures, they’re posted online (and pretty good) at the following location:

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Courses/cs280/2007fa/notes.htm

Psych 101 is the most popular class at Cornell. By a lot.

This semester, there are over 1,200 people taking it. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning, I have hundreds of classmates. Envy me.

Psych 101 has an extraordinarily good reputation among the student body. Almost anyone you ask will say that (1) the lectures are excellent and (2) the class is easy. The latter comment is probably more responsible for the large class size.

Psych 101 has historically been held in Bailey Hall, as is the case this semester. Here is a picture of my classmates just before the start of lecture:

The thing is, the lectures aren’t really excellent. They’re flashy and entertaining and everything, it’s true, and I agree that other professors could really use some of that in their own lectures. But the content consists of some kind of weird manipulative pseudo-science that causes everyone to go “wow! That was so emotional that it must be true!”

Dr. Mass happens to be fairly good at making people think that what they’ve heard “resonates” well with them. It’s as though he puts his presentations through a “Make This Sound Like Common Sense” machine. What he presents are essentially lists of ways people react in very specific circumstances, rather than methods that psychologists use to determine why those reactions occur.

Usually, the presentation of a new “reaction” goes something like this:

1. Give examples of a few studies where the notable reaction occurred most of the time
2. Show clips of gut-wrenching events in which the given reaction caused great harm to someone
3. Imply that the given reaction is a distinct, inherent part of the human psyche

Also, the main textbook, Psychology Eighth Edition in Modules by David Myers is filled with fluff and random, irrelevant “vocabulary” words like “biopsychosocial approach.” The book defines this as (I’m not kidding) “an integrated perspective that incorporates biological, psychological, and social-cultural levels of analysis.” Well I’ll be.

One particularly revealing passage of the textbook states, “[Psychologists] engage in interdisciplinary studies, such as [...] psychoceramics (the study of crackpots).” This sentence has a footnote which reads, “Confession time: I wrote the last part of this sentence on April Fools’ Day.”

Confession time: I think this course is a total waste of time.

Aaaaaannnnddddd…. we’re back. Once again, I cannot look in any direction but up without seeing some part of Cornell’s campus (they probably own a couple meters of sky, too, so maybe I can’t even look that way).

I’m in a double again, but to spice things up, that double is part of a suite in Becker Hall. Rooming with upper-classmen is a Good Idea™ if you want to get into Becker, which is indisputably the best dorm on West Campus. Indisputably. Or else. My suitemates happen to be three Glee Clubbers and the illustrious Joe McCourt, writer of The Crazy Cornellian.

Joe and I decorated one of the walls with a bunch of xkcd comics:

Glee Club and Hangs auditions are already over, and although some good singers tried out, there was no one really spectacular. Somewhat surprising was that a bunch of them had gone to state chorus in their respective states.

I should put a boringness meter on the top of every blog post just warn people ahead of time about posts like this one. Buuut just to drop the meter a little moooorrreee…

My classes this semester are Psych 101, Music 165 which is called “Computing in the Arts”, and CS 280, 312, and 330 for a total of only 16 credits. Some of the stuff from these classes is *actually* interesting, so I’ll have to write about that in other blog posts.

Although I didn’t mention it before, I became highly addicted to “World of Warcraft” near the end of summer, and ended up purchasing the full version. You know those stories that are like, “two parents became so addicted to WoW that they stopped feeding their kids” or “some young girl died after playing WoW for three days straight”? Let’s just say that they are actually under exaggerations of the actual addictive properties of this game. I took the side of the double away from the Ethernet jack, and am currently highly restricting myself from Internet usage in my room.

Don’t play WoW.

Everyone knows about the best spots on Cornell’s campus. The clock tower, dairy bar, and gorges are mentioned in virtually every piece of Cornell information propaganda literature available.

But on a campus as large as this one, the spots people talk about are not the only ones worth visiting. There is a wealth of great views, foods, and hiking spots that many undergrads simply miss.

1. Rhodes Hall Stairwell

The top of this stairwell offers one of the most striking views of Cornell’s campus available, perhaps third in line after the clocktower and the Johnson Museum.

Go in the main entrance of Rhodes hall. Take the elevator up to the seventh floor. Get off the elevator, take a few steps forward, turn left 90°, and walk forward until you come to a door underneath an “Exit” sign. Open the door. Walk forward. Open the next door.

After that, just remember to keep breathing and enjoy the walk down.

2. Ultra-Secret Dickson Computer Lab

There are tons of computer labs on campus, but none quite like the one in Dickson. For one, few people know about it. I never saw it get crowded or loud. It has its own bathroom and unlimited free staples and you can use the hole puncher as many times as you want, as in most labs, which is awesome.

Usually silent, frequently empty, and always secret.

3. Robison Herb Garden

Ever heard of heal-all, sneezewort, bible leaf, narcissus, or live-forever? Straight from the pages of Harry Potter (or is it the other way around?), all of these herbs — and others, too — may be found in the Robison Herb Garden, a part of the Cornell Plantations.

It’s definitely worth the walk there, if only to see the Yarb Woman protecting the garden with her eternal, piercing gaze.

———–

Well, those are the main spots. I’m probably missing a lot since I’ve only been here one year, but these are some of the best places I’ve seen. Let me know if you can think of some other, cooler un-talked-about place on campus.