MIT for a Day

As my writing instructor pointed out, I failed to send an email last week. I sincerely apologize. I will explain why in this email and I think you will agree that the wait was worth it.

The last week was an absolute grind. I stayed in the library until 11 or 12 every night, desperately trying to finish all my homework for the week. Why the rush? I had a flight to Boston, Massachusetts on Thursday, so I had to be done by then.

I took my physics exams, which were different from all other exams I've ever taken. Half the test was online, blending multiple-choice and free-response questions. The other half was an in-person, team exam in which we basically "performed" our physics knowledge for our teacher. It was much less stressful than I expected. I had to postpone some of my business writing homework and my religion midterm, but I finished everything necessary to survive the week.

I took the FrontRunner up to the airport on Thursday with nothing but a backpack, some clothes, and a dream. I visited MIT when I was little, but this was another chance to see it in all its glory. I flew to Boston that evening, arriving around midnight. Then I went with my friends to the hotel. We slept very peacefully.

In the morning, I walked over to this mediterranean place that my aunt recommended. This was the absolute coldest I have ever felt in my life. It said it felt like -16 degrees outside. I think it was lower. The snow was piled higher than the cars were tall. After eating a delicious pita, I walked over to the Stata Center to check-in and figured out what the hack (hehehe) was going on.

The Stata Center looked like something out of Meet the Robinsons on the outside, but inside it felt like a colorful warehouse. It was very strange. We got checked in and they gave us crewnecks, socks, and name badges. Things were starting to get official. Eventually they broke everyone into workshop groups and had the companies present who they were and what they did. This was really interesting. Turns out that quantum computing is, like, actually a big deal or something? Who knew? NVIDIA was there, and they told us that they can't even design their own quantum cicuits anymore. It's getting too hard, so they just have AI do it. I will say, although the environmental and ethical concerns of AI definitely need to be addressed and I am not minimizing that problem in any way, AI is capable of some pretty amazing things. Finding drugs that lower the activation energy of enzymes by 70%? That's pretty cool.

Our team split up to hear all of the companies give their shpeals. Afterwards, we decided how to rank the problems. There were 9 companies, all of whom had brought some kind of problem for us to work on. We still had no idea what exactly those problems were; we only knew what types of companies we had to choose from. They gave us tiny hints as to what the problem might be, but nothing that could actually inform a decision. We rated NVIDIA and the world's leading quantum computing company, IonQ, the highest. We ate some good Indian food, then went home and started brainstorming the potential problems and our desired deliverables for the competition.

We woke up the next morning to the news that we had been given IonQ's problem. It was our second choice, and it involved noisy quantum states. This was a good thing, because Nishant (a research teammate) had a lot of experience with noise, so we felt both excited and anxious about the potential problem. We walked in somehow colder weather than the day before to their actual student center. They gave us Dunkin Donuts for breakfast because, well, America runs on Dunkin--everybody knows this. At 10 am, they threw all of us in some rooms and had representatives from each company stand up to introduce their problem. They hit publish on the Github Repos (things that hold code) and said, "you've got 24 hours."

It was crazy. We had no idea what we were going to do. We started reading the code they'd given us and figured out that we would essentially be playing one giant game of "Ticket to Ride" and "Risk" smashed together. Better still, game moves would require a knowledge of both quantum principles and code skills to move throughout the map. I have done quite a few projects with Git before, but my install was messed up and I couldn't download things to the right folder. Two hours went by before we had successfully opened the code on our own computers.

The game worked as follows: a website connected to every team's code and displayed a world map. This map had a lot of cities (nodes) that were connected by lines (edges). Each edge was ranked by how hard it was to take (difficulty threshold). In order to "claim" an edge and move to another city, you had to "spend" money (Bell pairs) to create a quantum circuit and "attack" an edge. Harder difficulty edges had were harder to take (more noise) and required a higher threshold to claim, which could either be met by sacrificing more Bell pairs or with clever circuit design. Such was the nature of the game.

By the time we had the code up and running, some teams already had hundreds of points. We thought we were doomed. 7 hours went by and we still had yet to claim a single node. It was so discouraging. One team had run code called "claude_test134" and had over 450 points on the board. We had 0. It was frustrating. 11 hours in, we were still researching the problem and trying to figure out what we were even supposed to do.

Then, a breakthrough.

Nishant successfully claimed one edge. We were on the board! We were in last place, but it didn't matter. We'd done something. We came together as a team to figure out what we'd figured out in 12 hours. I had been working on making algorithms that could traverse the map once we'd figured out how to attack a node. A couple of my teammates had been working on figuring out how to attack each difficulty level. We pushed forward with our respective ideas. My teammates were able to perfectly reverse engineer the noise present in difficulty 1 edges (the easiest), which meant that our attack circuits for those edges would be the theoretical perfect ones. We had found something. Difficulty 2 proved to be similar, so we found that one pretty quickly as well. D3 took a little longer, but we eventually got it.

A couple hours later, they kicked us out of the MIT student center and sent us on a midnight walk to a nearby hotel. They opened their conference room for us and we sat down and got back to work. I completed complex algorithms for path searching and optimization, which would allow our bot to enter the game and take over automatically. A couple hours later, we cracked D4.

At around this time, we got a message from the sponsors. At 1:30 am, they messaged everyone with a new piece of information: they had completely wiped the database and everyone had to start over. Turns out there was a bug in the setup that allowed teams to repeatedly attack an edge without having the proper fidelity, and since quantum is probabilistic, they would eventually succeed. They were also violating the non-locality principle we were supposed to follow, but we had ruled it out of our solution space long ago because the rules forbid it.

About 30 minutes later, Kai sent me the attack circuits for difficulties 1-4. I plugged them into my algorithm, started a new session, and pressed play. We watched the bot claim city after city, with small messages telling us that it had succeeded. Our team shot into first place. Nobody else had claimed anything. We were ecstatic. We went from being completely confused and in the dust to having perfect attacks and bots to run them. We started designing other types of algorithms that would spread across the map using different philosophies, like greedy, return on investment, and cluster identification. Eventually, we combined them all into a one hybrid model that would switch between modes based on map and organism conditions. It was pretty sweet.

Kai also made a playable version of the game on his computer so that he could just click and play manually. This was also a big deal, because it let us test out our perfect attacks on anything we wanted to. By the end of our algorithm design, we were actually starting to run into our own bots, which was a problem, because those bots had perfect attacks and therefore couldn't be beat. That meant we couldn't test our algorithms any further. It was annoying yet hilarious. We had almost done too well.

Somewhere in the next 6 hours, we wrote a paper, made a slide deck, built a website, and ported Kai's game to that website (with formatting for mobile). It was crazy. I made some Python animations with Manim to illustrate how our algorithms worked. We packaged it all up into a Github Repo and sent it in for judging. 10 minutes and 2 bagels later, we walked to another building to present our solution to the company representatives. I think I forgot to mention... we and all the other teams stayed up all night long to work on the problem. We didn't sleep at all. It was insane.

We were the last group to present. It was crazy. One team named "Quih" *dying rose emoji* was a sight to behold. They were five clones of each other, each doing Fortnite dances and saying things like, "it's not that shrimple." We got to see everyone else's solution and see how smart they were for what they did. There were kids from MIT, Yale, and Algeria. There were kids in CS, Physics, and Math. There were PhD and grad students too, all competing against us. I wasn't nervous, I was just excited to show off what we did. It was a really cool problem and I felt like we had a cool solution. We gave our 8 minute presentation answered some questions, then went back to the Stata Center for lunch.

We were slightly late to the award ceremony so we didn't sit together. Kai and I stood in the very back of the giant lecture hall. They announced the winners the QuEra challenge, and we were just happy to see it all happen. IonQ was next. They asked for a drumroll and turned the slide. It said "Q-Gars". I didn't even recognize that it was our name for about 3 seconds. I couldn't believe it.

We won MIT's international quantum hackathon! We took first place!

We were beyond excited. We walked down to the bottom of the hall where they gave us each our certificates, a water bottle, and a Nintendo Switch 2. It feels like a dream. Maybe because I hadn't slept in 30 hours. Anyway, we took a couple pictures, then we had to rush off to the airport to fly home! I got back at 12 am that night. I was so tired.

Upon arriving home, we also learned that our Quantum Information Student Association had finally been approved. I am acting as co-president with a couple friends from research. We are really excited about this and already have a lot of students and companies who want to participate. We also want to start something like iQuHACK in the west at BYU, since there are only 3 quantum hackathons in the US. The MIT one is the only one that is very popular. I'm excited to see how that goes.

I hear that there may be some interesting articles to read about our experiences. I'll send more information on those once I have it.

It is so late and I have school in the morning, but there's your big update on what's happening in my world. I'd love to hear from all of you. Email me!

-will

PS: for those who are interested and can view websites, here's the one we built 
https://qgarsiong.vercel.app/iQuhackweb.html#game

And for the first time in a while, here are some photos. I'll send more later when I get them back.

Presenters Extraordinaires

Where's Will, though?

Just after the database was cleared and nobody did anything

The actual announcement of the Great Reset, from the sponsor

The Lord of the Flown

Hello again,

Again, I am aware of the lack of consistency in these electronic correspondences. I would make some witty excuse as to why I failed to write last week, or the week before, but the truth is that I simply didn't feel like writing. It's my blog. I can skip if I want to.

My time in France has come to a close, and I am very sad for it to be over. I would go back and live there if I could, but what I think I really loved was the freedom from everything. It feels almost like there was this other version of me that existed there, one that I was more comfortable with and more confident in being. He hid a little bit in the anonymity of the language, but it wasn't out of fear. It saved a lot of mental effort to ignore conversations completely because they were in some complex dialogue I couldn't understand. I learned a lot more than French there; I learned how to show up for someone, I learned how to be independent but not separate from a group, I learned that people really do actually like genuineness.

For the last week, I have been in Connecticut again waiting for Christmas, similar to last year. My circumstances are obviously different, but it is interesting that my changes in phases of life get a three week buffer. In my infinite boredom, I have done a lot of thinking. I take walks like I'm 50 years old, sometimes 2 or 3 hours. I don't know. I enjoy them.

In this perpetual state of reflection, I also did something that I might not normally do: I picked up a book and I read it. I didn't read it out of obligation, I just read it for the sake of reading it. Which book, you ask? Why, Lord of the Flies, of course.

I am aware of this novel's status as king of banned book lists in the English speaking world. That's part of why I wanted to read it. If you know me well, it's that I have to be in the right mood to accomplish something. I was not in that mood in the 10th grade, when I was tasked with writing an essay on symbolism and selected this particular book as the palette from which to write of. It was due in class the following morning and I had not so much as read a page of the book. This was in the days before ChatGPT, and a seasoned professional procrastinator might have had the sense to read something like Cliff's Notes (which I saw physical copies of in France at vintage bookstores -- dang have people been cheating reading for a long time). The thought did not cross my mind. Instead, I perused the list of approved novels, saw Lord of the Flies -- ironic, I know -- and read until a symbol was mentioned. I believe it was on page six or seven that the conch shell was introduced, and I did not take in another page of that book. I grasped at straws and wrote that entire essay without having any clue as to the plot and turned it in the following morning. I did, in fact, put the A in essay; when a teacher tells you they can tell when you do something last minute, they are probably not lying. However, they don't always expect it, and you just might be able to get away with it if you write well enough that the possibility doesn't cross their mind. I don't think it was a good essay, and I'd be interested to see what I wrote about 5 years ago on a book I hadn't read. Sorry, Mr. Nagro.

Things have changed. I have read it. 

It is imaginatorily graphic. People die, and it does describe their death, but it leaves much of that description for the reader to imagine. If a youth of 13 read this book, they would probably rate it as less graphic than a 27 year old would simply because their ability to imagine such grotesque scenes is probably lesser. Even the children participating in the murders likely didn't really see them as murders. They saw them as defense and as solutions to problems that lie in front of them. However, they knew they were wrong, since nobody will talk about them. I'm about to spoil the book. Don't complain, it's been out forever.

There are 3 literal murders in this book, all to varying degrees of fault. The first is a young, unnamed boy with a birthmark. Piggy and Ralph, two main characters, realize they hadn't seen him since the first day of their desert island survival efforts post plane crash. This was a murder of neglect. The second is the murder of Simon, who suffers from some illness and is already in a state of fragility when he mistakenly happens upon a pig-killing ritual and finds himself being beat, as they all believe him to be "the beast" that has haunted their island. Nobody was willing to put a stop to things and think for a moment, and Simon simply became a casualty. A lack of factuality and rational thinking led to his death. This was a murder of ignorance. The third is the active, intentional murder of Piggy as he demands his glasses back. Two groups had formed between the now "savage" boys and the rational ones, the ones who understand that keeping a fire to lead to their rescue should be the primary task. The hunting tribe kills Piggy as an act of half-defense, since they weren't really under threat, but their leader told them they were. This was a shift from the passive to the active malevolence that continues through their rescue. The hunters begin to hunt Ralph like one of their pigs for trying to restore the order they once had, and there is very nearly a fourth murder. In some miracle of timing, a naval officer sees the smoke from their island, which they were burning to get Ralph out of the forest. This all-consuming destruction was still fire, and it happened to save them, but only because they had begun to destroy themselves. The fifth and final murder in the book is genocide of the boys' innocence. After the arrival of the officer snaps them from their self-created societal structures, they are forced to come to terms with the horrible things they had done. The severity increases with each one, suggesting that the transition from innocent to guilty is the most brutal.

I can see why this book gets banned, but I understand why it is important that it isn't. It is a commentary and an exploration on how horrible things come about. It looks into why and when people lose their humanity and what drives them to do unimaginable things to one another. It comes slowly, with an implicit decision to ignore rational thinking in favor of immediate reward. They crave meat over the plentiful fruit available to them and hunting for pigs becomes the thing that converts them. Are we any different? Many of us have all we really need. We ignore our friends who are struggling until it's too late to make a difference. We still find tax loopholes when we can and figure, hey, it's my money. We still look down at a homeless person and decide they don't deserve our generosity, participating in their deaths. Eventually, we're voting for people that condemn an altruistic worldview and ignore the things we lose along the way. We begin to fight over resources until we are fighting each other and lose sight of the fact that we all started this together. 

Of course, that's a bit of a dramatization, and I don't expect most of the people reading this to get to a point that they are actively choosing malevolence over kindness. I also understand that things are a bit more complicated than a linear story and that some choices are hard because answers aren't totally right or wrong.

This exercise of morality is something that has really been on my mind lately. It has a special name in psychology, called a locus of control. This fancy looking Latin word simply signifies the source of something and what influences it. I have been thinking about the locus of control for morality. 

There are two sides, an internal side and an external side. An external locus of control would mean that someone does something for a reward. Sometimes these rewards are direct, like, "clean your room and you get a cookie," other times, not so much, say, if you check up on your ministering family you get to say "i did it" to the person you are supposed to report to. One is a very direct logical statement, the other is much more complex yet still retains the same motivation. The internal locus of control means that you do something just because you believe that you should. Maybe I will clean my room because having a clean room is important to me. I will check up on someone I know because I wonder how they are doing. I write these emails from a place with an internal locus of control, by the way. I don't care who reads them. My mom isn't making me. I write them because I like writing them and feel like I have things to say sometimes.

One major goal that an individual spends their entire life trying to achieve is to become themselves. Part of that lifelong process includes morality, shaping not just what you do, but why you do it. You get to make active decisions every day. Most of them do not require a deliberate choice involving complex questions of ethics, which is probably a good thing. If they did, we'd all go to bed at 8 o'clock every night, which would make late night hangouts very boring. However, we still have some level of responsibility to make those choices for ourselves. Letting someone or something else make a choice for us completely circumvents the growth that is supposed to occur. I have more often thought about this in an LDS context lately, in addition to the general form I normally think about, so you can read this with that interpretation in mind if you want to, but know that it isn't the only one.

I have been frustrated lately by the lack of trust I feel that is given to me to choose for myself. You may ask, "okay, computer man. What specific events can you point to that you are not being trusted? You gotta be specific." To you I say, I don't need them. It is a general attitude that I have picked up on in my time at a church sponsored school and I am voicing my concern. I don't like when rules are laid down thick because they rob the individuals beneath them from the chance to practice being ethical. I think this is one thing that I loved about being in France so much: I had a wonderful professor and program director who gave all of us the chance to choose for ourselves and see what we really felt was important. If it worked for us and we felt good about it, he did too. I felt like we handled ourselves pretty well. Of course, there were occasions where, looking back, we would have done something completely different, but now we know. Turns out experience is a pretty good teacher.

In order to adopt a position on a subject, one must practice having their opinion. It is not optional for the sake of the belief. They must see how it stands compared to others, to scrutiny, to practicality. If they find that it doesn't work, they are presented with three options. They can a) switch to agree with the opposite side, b) lie to themselves and double down on their original opinion, or c) adapt their thinking to accommodate new information. Guess which of these is the easiest? Guess which one is the hardest? One of them requires an honest introspection to determine exactly which parts of a belief need to disappear, and which ones simply need pruning. Sometimes you find the whole tree is dead and infected and needs to be removed. That is okay too, you can't hold onto that tree just because it was "your favorite" or had "been there the longest". Be honest with yourself, and recognize that you may find yourself realizing that you had been right the first time. Quite literally for the sake of all of our futures, do not just shut down and give up and go to beliefs that aren't yours. Have your own. They don't have to match a template. They can be yours and they will be better when they are yours.

The most poignant moment in Lord of the Flies was in its final page. The naval officer sees the boys in their paint, blood, and mud, holding their spears, and yelling at one another. Casually, he asks, "What, are you playing war or something?" Then, as if to further the cruel joke, he asks, "Was anybody killed?" Ralph responds with a harrowing "two". 

"Playing war". This man, actively engaged in war himself, did not understand the scene in front of him until it was too late. It simply took his presence for all of the children to understand what it was that they were doing, and that it all looked like some sort of casual game. Real people had died. It wasn't just a game anymore. The frenzy was over.

That was it. I had been rescued; what from, I don't know, but it didn't feel like much of a rescue. I left for Paris thinking that I would have to do some real mental prep and build some kind of stoicism in being gone, and that it was about to be a very long 88 days. I threw up in September, the night I left. I was so anxious I couldn't sleep at all. When we left a couple weeks ago, I felt the same way. I had to go home. I couldn't stay anymore or the government would come get me. I was being rescued.

I felt like this the night before our trip ended, when I realized, "that was it." That whole three months that I had just spent working on the way I thought and making friends was over. I had grown really, really close to people. They were inevitably going to disappear as our schedules and social lives made different demands for us. I wasn't going to see them everyday. Over the last couple weeks, I have realized how much I am going to miss a lot of people and how much I really care about them. I felt much happier and better around those people. I was kinder, more likeable, more considerate, funnier (hard to imagine, I know), and more fun to be around. Things are going to be different. I'm not on the island anymore, and the rules aren't the same. I'm not playing war.

From Paris, I learned how to relate to people. I learned that I was capable of caring a whole lot more than I thought I could. And, I learned how to speak French. Sort of.

Anyway, that's probably most of my thoughts as of late. Welcome home, Jacob! also Claire, Ashlee, Becca, Abby, Eden, and Link. Love you guys.

-Will

School is No Longer Out

So.. umm...

I did survive my first week back at real school. I wasn't really sure if I would for a minute there. It had me in the first half, I'm not gonna lie. Happy to report that I'm still alive and haven't died just yet. My schedule is quite terrible and I have no time to think about anything other than my homework problems, work, and taking notes, but I try to squeeze in some fun stuff here and there.

I will explain in more detail in a future email, but for now, it sufficeth to say that I have increased my work responsibilities tenfold. I was reinstated to my research position and am now in charge of more than usual at the BYU Career Services office. I'm sure it will be enjoyable. My research focus this month is about preparing for the highlight of January (and probably February too, screw you Valentine's Day): the quantum hackathon at MIT. I am excited to go to try my skills with other motivated undergraduate students and I am impressed that this event is actually happening. I don't feel like I get out much besides the occasional study abroad, so the opportunity to take a short trip somewhere will be refreshingly different. It will also be odd to travel with just a carryon, but it'll be kinda fun to see how little I can survive off of. I booked my flights a couple days ago and I think everything is ready to go, so stay tuned for how that goes. I'm not promising anything.

Math = hard work. I think proof-based math is hardest for me because you have to know exactly where you're allowed to start and where you're not. Physics = hard work. This is a different kind of work because it is intense and complicated, but the problem is usually pretty well defined. It's just up to you to figure out how to get what you want. You also get to decide what you want, which is sometimes nice. You probably don't care about any of that, so I'll stop talking about that. I have been learning about knowing my audience in my business writing class, and this entire paragraph was just a clever segway to get to that instead.

I am taking Management Communications from the fantastic Kristin McQuivey and I am very excited for that course. It is my first in the Tanner Building (business school). I won't say that stereotypes are true... but I won't tell you you're wrong for thinking that. I walked into class and there was a kid in a three-piece suit who looked like he had cut his hair that day. This kid seemed as though he belonged in a movie like Wolf of Wall Street (obviously rated much lower, c'mon, I would never have watched something so deplorable). Not in a bad way or a good way, just in a way. He spoke as though he were permanently stuck in a business meeting, which made me laugh a little bit. It definitely isn't my style, but hey, you do you man from MCOM.

Basically, I hate being back. Okay, hate is a strong word. But I do miss France. I don't get to just do what I want anymore, I have to deal with people again and have responsibilities and can't just live in a perpetual state of exploration and curiosity. Well, I suppose I can intellectually, but that gets tiring after about hour number 0. This semester, I have work or class starting at 10 am all the way through 7pm on Mondays, 8pm on Tuesday, and 5 all the other days. How do I stay sane, you ask? I don't know. I am hoping to figure that out. I keep a planner with all of my assignments and I work ahead when I can. I am sure that I will be ready for a break come April.

I got one such break today, actually. Usually a good break consists of something that 1. entertains me, 2. makes me laugh, and 3. requires minimal brain power. Today I got a message from an account I didn't know on Instagram, and they were very clearly trying to catfish me. I messed with them for about an hour before they eventually quit responding. It is fun to be a mirror and just ask them all the questions that you refuse to answer. "what city do you live in? i wanna know if we're close" becomes "well what city do yooouu live in? cause i wanna know if we're close but i can't tell you where i am". Then you watch as they get increasingly pissed off at you for not complying with their slightly concerning demands. I love making scammers upset. It's one of my favorite hobbies.

You know what actually upset me this week? Watching a religion professor make fun of a girl in class for having questions and disagreeing with the professor's points when he asked her to explain how she felt. I can't imagine how humiliated this girl felt as the professor got the whole class to laugh at how dumb her question was (it wasn't, although I never would have asked it), then try to argue her way back to a level of competence. The most frustrating thing of all was to see someone in a position of power lack the proper maturity to say, "if you're still stuck on this, let's talk after class about it," especially when it was such a small thing to argue over that was completely unimportant to the curriculum for the day. Or he could have said, "I can see we have different opinions, can we agree to disagree and move on?" No. He had to prove his opinion was the only option and that all others were so bad that the entire auditorium should laugh at them. Safe to say, I dropped his class.

Allow me to combine this with some of my learnings in the physics world. Don't worry, I'll stick to Stephen Hawking's mantra of making science easy to understand for the normal person. He understood a lot. He didn't stand under much, though. Anyway, I've learned in my physics studies that when you do things at a large scale, you can have definite answers. Things can be black and white for a large group of things. For example, if I throw a ball at my brother (a common occurrence), it will move through the air and either hit him, or it won't. It will obviously hit him because I have superior throwing abilities, but I digress. In another sense, when a population is faced with a question, there can be a generally correct answer. Sometimes those answers are hard to find, and perhaps that is what all the fuss is about. The reason for this definition tends to be the result of an average. When you add up the paths of all of the options together, the most common one is the one that occurs. When I throw that ball, some of the particles in it do miss my brother. Some of them fly away to the sun. However, when the many moles (a really big number) of molecules within the ball are given a chance to take a path from a set of initial conditions, they are just gonna take the one that's most likely to happen.

Weirdly enough, physics tends to describe non-physical phenomena fairly often. Humanity's course just tends towards what is most likely to occur. We don't have war all the time because that isn't very sustainable, and there aren't very many futures where a world constantly at war exists. That's why we're not in them. You may have heard that the universe tends towards disorder, and there is a very intuitive and simple reason for it. How many ways are there for a glass to remain unshattered? Just one. How many ways are there for a glass to shatter? Well, the answer isn't clear anymore because it is all over the floor. Over the course of the glass' lifetime, it will tend towards being broken. How many ways are there to have a truly peaceful world? We have to hope that there is more than one, or we are just never going to get there.

The summing of different chances and just seeing what happens is actually at the heart of something called Fourier analysis, which is simply the addition of different waves and the new one they produce. When you add up (let them interfere with one another) all of the different wave functions that describe how something moves, they tend to eventually settle on what is most common among them all. Come find me in the BYU library if you want a more complicated explanation.

You may find yourself asking the immediately interesting question: what if we only look at a really short time? or what if we make the thing we're looking at really small? This is precisely what I wanted to talk about. For our purposes, those two questions are practically the same thing, although there are some fundamental differences that we will ignore. When you zoom all the way in on something, it no longer exists as a yes or a no. It is made up of yes and no. It can be mostly yes, a little no; half yes, half no, or any other combination of yes and no. And guess what? If you blink and look again, it will be different. Not because the object itself has changed, but because you have. You've both moved forward in time, which advanced the wave in this really cool thing called phase, and now it just looks different. What makes it yes/no, right/wrong, good/bad is what it does in the long term. In other words, it matters what happens when you put it in its place and let it run its course.

Shift your thinking away from physical particles and atom diagrams and other confusing things. Picture a person. More specifically, think of a difficult choice that this person has to make. Maybe they just found out their friend's boyfriend is cheating on them. Should they tell someone? They are just like a qubit, which is a neat way to describe these fractional yes/no things. In this one moment, they will judge what is happening around them and weigh their odds: some percent yes, some percent no. Eventually, they have to choose and collapse their probabilities into one choice, but they are always able to choose either up until that decision is made. Let's pretend that on this day, they choose yes. They could choose no tomorrow (although that wouldn't help them any), but more importantly, they could also choose no the next time they have to choose. Their yes/no probabilities will likely fluctuate over time, and may even be totally opposite based on what information they have available to them. Only when they are given the chance to make a choice a thousand times can you really evaluate how they stand and what they value. 

Sometimes you don't have time to waste. You could ask a thousand people the question and then see how they answer. Then you can say, on average, people chose this yes x percent of the time. They were more or less likely to choose no than yes under certain circumstances. When you add more people, you can see what they are like as a group and you can better guess at how one person might feel.

I basically just taught you quantum mechanics in 4 paragraphs. If you made it this far, I am sure you are thinking "what the heck does this have to do with anything?" Well, there are a few hecks that this has to do with.

One of them is the heck that in one particular moment, a single choice is never black and white. It is always a continuous spectrum of pros and cons and some will be much easier to choose than others. The only thing that has any statistical significance is what happens in the long run. Ask yourself which choice you made most often after the 50th time and compare that with what you think a "good choice" is. Do it a thousand times before you declare which is good and which is bad. You have to try different scenarios to figure it out because odds are that you don't know. This also works for groups. When a large group of people chooses to support something, we can evaluate whether or not that was the correct choice and if we align with our own standards of good as a whole. If we're not happy, that means we chose wrong overall and have to try again.

Another is the heck I live in by attending BYU and living in Provo. The odds of finding people who think like me and believe like I do are low, because the group represents the most common among them. My peers in this one particular school in this one particular state tend to support one particular set of ideas, so those are going to be the people I am most likely to meet. This is true in any group with an overarching set of beliefs. It is unlikely (but not impossible) that you could find someone who is a member of the church but believes nothing. It is unlikely that you will find someone who believes that the earth is flat but the moon is round. It is unlikely that I will find someone who cares about what I care about and isn't something like me. It is just a statistical thing. They don't determine outcomes, they skew them. I often feel a bit out of place at this school because I know that if I was asked to compare myself with the group average, I would be pretty far from it. Not in a positive or negative way, just a way. This is especially scary for things like dating, since my odds are just so low when the distribution is so narrow. I write that to say if you feel that way, don't worry. It's just a statistical thing and it isn't you. Okay, it might be you. You should probably get some advice.

Anyway, I'm exhausted and I have work in the morning, but I felt that was important enough to say. Hopefully I can be forgiven for being late again.

Signing off,

-Will

PS. Martin Luther King Jr Day countdown begins

PPS. I'm back on the flip phone so if I don't answer you on Instagram or Facebook, that's why, let me know if you need my number

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Salutations, people of the internet.

I write to you on the blessed and wonderful day of Martin Luther King, Jr. It is thanks to him that we enjoy these wonderful hours free from our academic duties. For that, I am indebted to him.

(And also all his work on true emancipation and Civil Rights and all that stuff too, but you already knew all of that)

This week was chock full of homework. I maybe messed up on the same problem several times, which took up a lot of time, but that's okay. Failing is learning. Despite these setbacks, I was able to complete several very entertaining activities and one very embarrassing event that might top my life's list.

Due to popular demand, I will begin with the embarrassing story. If you are familiar with BYU, you may know the stairs in the Wilkinson Student Center that are next to the bowling alley. I take those stairs almost every day to work. I maybe see a person a week on those stairs. They are not heavily traveled so they are my time to really, uh, let loose, you know, be myself on those stairs. One such quirk that accomplishes that task is my once daily wall run. Since I know that there will be nobody on the stairs and I definitely know that I am late to work, I usually go down these stairs at a mind-numbing speed and just catch myself on the wall at the end. Then, I turn and do it again for the next half flight. On this particular day, I was flying down the second set per uge (pronounced "per youshge" ) and saw, in the corner of my eye, the small wide-angle mirror that showed a girl just beyond the blind turn. I was going too fast to slow down, but I also didn't want to embarrass myself and surprise or scare this girl by running into the wall, so my stupid ahh brain decided the smartest thing to do was to grab the corner of the wall and swing around it, transferring my momentum into forward motion. This felt perfectly reasonable to me, as it put to use the energy I had already expended. It would also probably look super cool or something. What I wasn't counting on was the fact that despite all other wall corners on that staircase having an outcropped trim lip, this corner didn't have one. My hand reached out to hold something that wasn't there as the rest of my body continued down the stairs and towards the wall. Unfortunately, this girl was also in between me and the wall. In a flurry of panicked thoughts, my dumb ahh brain decided that the best course of action would be to try to pull a spin move and dodge the girl, save her life, and make myself a hero. This would have been an incredible plan except that I had a backpack on, which swung around and hit the girl anyways. She was rightfully confused, and I would like to make it known here, in writing, that I did not fall down. I said sorry about a million times and kept saying it as I walked away in shame. Please do not judge me for this. I know that I made a mistake. It won't happen again. It will. I will do my wall run every single day that I work at that office. 

Speaking of the office, some of us went bowling. 5/10 frames were strikes, including the first four in a row. I was quite pleased. I also sold the clip for all the rest of them, but we don't have to talk about my failures. 

After a night of hanging out, the legendary Jacob Hiatt and I went home to find our friends in my room. They were lying on a mattress on the ground, looking up at the popcorn ceiling and playing Mario Party via a vertical projector, which was actually just a horizontal projector turned on its side. If you have a chance to do this, I highly recommend it. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Afterwards, it was 2 in the morning. You might have expected me to go to bed. I did not. Instead, I went to a Harry Potter movie marathon and didn't watch any Harry Potter. We hot tubbed till 4:30. I did not arise until noon the next day, but we didn't have school, so no harm no foul.

Another story involving hot tubbing occurred this week. We were sharing embarrassing moments at the Sparks hot tub—allow me to clarify, we were in the hot tub—and my friend (who will not be named to save her reputation) explained what she thought a "matter baby" was. It was naturally brought on by the use of the classic jest "would you rather have a goat baby or a matter baby", and I cannot say I understood much of the explanation but here it is, verbatim: "I thought that it was like, a baby, made of, like, ice cream or something? Like it has a head made of ice cream and is kind of melty. OH! And it makes the sound of hitting a wet towel on the ground when you put it over your shoulder too. It like has like two black eyes and a little smile, and that's a matter baby. You know the short where the mom has a dumpling for a kid? It's pretty much like that." I will never look at a matter baby the same way again.

What's a matter baby, you ask? Nothing much, what's a matter with you?

Our apartment was selected to be the touring apartment for the complex, which means we enjoy an incredibly generous discount of $25 a month on our rent. Really knocked it out of the park with that one. Maybe one day I'll get that parking pass I was told I was on the waitlist for, which is also $25 a month. They sure are weird, those Sparks managers.

Now that the secondary stories are out of the way, let's get to the big one.

In light of the glorious day circled many times over on the academic calendar, I went with a couple of my friends to southern Utah to do a couple of hikes. They were very enjoyable. As a male, I truly enjoy walking in a line away from the car then turning around and doing it all again. All jokes aside, this was very fun. It is very interesting how slot canyons seem to just appear out of nowhere. You walk forever into the distance and suddenly you're in one. We got to go into two of them: one was very large and the other very slim. In fact, the thin one was so tight that we had to climb over the water pools by wedging ourselves in between the walls. For much of this canyon, it was the only way through. I was fully stretched out, hands on one wall and feet on the other, attempting to get to the end of this canyon. It came to a sad conclusion when we discovered the final walls were joined at such an angle that one couldn't possibly apply enough pressure to both of them to get up. We also found these very cool iron deposits that formed perfect balls. We enjoyed a great conversation on the dangers of scientific distrust and I was proud of my friends and their opinions.

There was much driving on this trip. I had many learnings on the nature of the female mind and its relationship to the perception of relationships. Again, as a male, this was all good information for me to know. Turns out there is much discourse in the discipline of talking to boys and many experts are asked to weigh in on the topic when it arises. Who knew? It is apparently a calculated, measured science with careful rules, laws, theories, and models. It's no wonder I'm so afraid of them.

Also, I discovered that people from 35-55 think that it is funny to be called old. This does not hold true for people over 60. There is a grey area between 55 and 60. Foray at your own risk.

Do not eat hamburgers at the McDonald's in Kanab. Trust me on this. Stick to the chicken.

Welcome home to Paige Bishop! And thank you Kelly (I hope I spelled this right) Bishop for the incredible food and breakfast cake. Do not tell her that I ate, like, 5 slices.

I don't have much else to say for this one, so I guess I'll just end it by saying that Martha Luker Keen Juner died for our sins. If you know what that means, then thank you for your laughter. If you don't, you can keep on being confused and life will go on.

Goodbye,

Will

Did you just say Hims doesn't work?

Once again, hello.

Welcome to the segment of our show in which our contestant attempts to recount the events of his recent life to many people through an electronic teleprompter! It is up to voice these parts as you see fit!

Enter Will and Taylor in the Walmart hair care aisle. They are vocalizing their hilarity, as they tend to do when they are together.

Taylor, reading a bottle of shampoo: Every Man Jack?

Will: Listen, Taylor. I've talked to a lot of guys, and not all of them are named Jack. Trust me on this one.

Out of nowhere, a guy who looks like he was the star outfielder of his high school baseball team chimes in. He doesn't appear much older than Will and Taylor.

Baseball Guy, panicked: Did you just say Hims doesn't work?

Will proceeds to overexplain the thought process behind the joke he had just made, just to help the guy out.

Baseball Guy, relieved: Oh, good. For a second there I thought you were saying Hims doesn't work. I'm trying to hold on to it as long as I can, you know? Better safe than... better to be cautious than not, right?

Will and Taylor stutter in agreement. Baseball Guy removes his hat, as if to demonstrate his need. It does the opposite, instead revealing a perfectly normal hairline with absolutely no noticeable hair loss or recession.

Baseball Guy: Yeah, see what I mean? I gotta keep this going as long as possible.

Baseball Guy puts his hat back on and walks away. Will and Taylor wait for him to leave the aisle and then burst out laughing.

That, my friends, is a prime example of the fact that there is never a dull moment at Walmart. How a man with such a fine hairline could project his insecurities onto our comment not at all related to Hims hair care supplies is beyond me, yet I was sufficiently entertained by him, and have been quoting him all week amongst my friends.

I was at Walmart because I have officially moved into the Sparks II. It is just behind the Vasa on 900 East. It is fine as far as apartments go, not nice, but cheap, so that makes up for a lot. I am getting financially bullied by them in other fees like security deposits, convenience fees, etc, but that is okay. I'm hoping living here is fun. It has been for the last 36 hours, so I like to imagine that it will be.

I am a little bit cooked once school starts. I have a completely full schedule from 9-5 every day, and then homework and such after that. Mix that with drama from friends and navigating complex relationships and that leaves me with minimal time to just breathe. Hopefully it goes okay. I think I need work and school to help me not think about other things. I can just work on the math problems and drown out the world for a while. It is a nice feeling. The tests and requirements that those problems fulfill are not very nice, however. I am hoping that I have enough prior experience that I can skip my CS lab like I did with the last class that I took, because otherwise I may have no social life whatsoever. How am I ever going to find people to spend life with if I never meet them?

I have felt very odd lately. Sometimes I've felt so much energy and am happy to talk to my friends and felt super bubbly; in a matter of hours that can change to a complete aversion to any desire to talk to anybody. I have felt restless yet tired at the same time. I don't want to do anything at all but I also feel like I need to do something, but nothing that I do seems to alleviate the need to do something else. I don't know what to do about it. I get more irritable and frustrated and impatient, yet there's nothing going on, and that's almost the problem. However, I dread the very near future when I have to do work and have assignments again. I have noticed that caffeine helps me feel more normal again, but I obviously can't just drink Monsters all the time. I will forget to eat anything, and then when I get hungry enough that I decide it's time to solve the problem, nothing looks good and I feel a little nauseous. I seriously don't know what my problem is, I might just be stressed from school starting. And moving back from somewhere I loved to somewhere I don't. And dealing with people and losing friends and all the things that come with living around other human beings.

I am happy to be home and have my friends again. I am excited to do stuff with them and get to make more fun memories. 

One such memory occurred earlier in the week. I was with a couple of my friends having a small yet glorious reunion when one of them said, "I'm feeling spontaneous. Do you guys want to do something crazy?" Of course we responded in the positive, very curious as to what she could possibly say next. "My mom is getting a hotel room tonight so that her Marriott account will get to level 75. What if we just went and used the pool?" It was so funny. We got swimsuits and checked in for her mom, pretended to be excited to spend the night as "cousins" in order to fool the people around us by talking slightly too loudly (as if they cared at all), and swam in a fairly cool pool for several hours. We were probably the funniest three people alive for a while. Then we went upstairs, showered, changed, and pretended to be leaving out to find something to eat when we actually just went home. It was so funny. It felt like something out of a comedy movie. I was very glad it happened, because there is always this fear when you hang out with old friends you haven't seen in a while, this fear that you have both changed too much and that you aren't really as compatible as you used to be. Happy to conclude that was not that case.

Speaking of differences, I saw Zootopia 2. The plot was entertaining. Although the acting and some of the dialogue was the most cringe and forced I have ever seen, the central messaging of the movie was good. Lowkey almost cried. I've felt a little sad more often lately. I don't know what it is. Just felt kinda directionless more often than I usually do. I think that school will help. Maybe that's why I found Zootopia to be more emotionally engaging, cause usually I probably wouldn't and would have thought it was cringe instead. Who knows? Not me.

I also saw the finale of Stranger Things season five. I watched only the first season several years ago, so it didn't make sense at first. I don't feel particularly compelled to watch the whole show, I feel like the finale gave a pretty good recap. I hate Eleven now though. She was better when she had no speaking lines. Derek was incredible. Amazed that he couldn't find it in him to run when he is literally about to die, but what do I know about being Derek? I support the theory that the entire show was just one big game of Dungeons and Dragons and that none of it was real at all.

I watched Superbad again. For like, the 4th time in the last month. I McLove how stupid it is. I McLove Jonah Hill, and Michael Cera, and whatever random kid they got to play Fogell. He is the best.

Anyway, I think that's about all I have to say. I could say more as there are additional things going on in my life, but I will keep it to myself, I suppose. I won't bore you with the details. It is late.

-Will

Alphabet, Inc

Hello everyone,

I am aware that it has been a while. I am still alive, albeit quite a bit colder than I was three weeks ago. I haven't written because I've been a little busy. What have I been busy with, you ask? Thank goodness for electronic mail.

First (and least importantly), I saw Wicked 2. I have not seen the first edition of Wicked, but I did get it explained to me, so I was 100% filled in and knew exactly what was going on. Alphabet is wicked because she is green, but she's the only one who knows how to read the Grimace Shake. F-boyero is in love with her even though he's engaged to Ariana Galinda, who secretly knows about the whole situation with Alphabet and Ozzy but can't publicly reveal herself. Alphabet and Ariana Galinda are friends from Shiz. Then Alphabet's little sister, Musty Rose, gets killed. She was in love with a Munchkin (she is not a Munchkin herself, learned that the hard way) and she's a little bit scarily obsessed with him, but doesn't know that he was in love with Ariana Galinda. Alphabet goes X-Games mode on a bunch of people cause Dorothy ragebaited her by stealing her sisters sentimental shoes (even though she couldn't walk, she was both in a wheelchair and dead, but reasonable crashout by Alphabet), even though Ariana Galinda lowkey gave them to her. Ariana Galinda crashes out on Alphabet for stealing her huzz (valid), but then Alphabet fakes her death by letting Dorothy think she killed her and runs away with F-boyero. Oh, and I guess some animals got freed at some point. All cause of some ugly pair of heel click shoes that weren't even red.

Also, if I have to hear the phrase "clock-tick" one. More. Time. I am going to have an Alphabet-level crashout too.

Other than my surface level analysis, I thought there were some interesting rhetorical points raised in the work. There is a scene in which Alphabet and Ariana Galinda are talking to Ozzy and he tells them that the truth isn't what's true, it's what people believe. Sometimes people aren't telling you what's true, they're just saying what people believe. If that's how it works, then what's the difference? I like how Philip K Dick says it: "Reality is that which, when you've stopped believing in it, doesn't go away." This relates well to a lot of things I've studied lately.

I watched two very good movies recently, and both of them were so incredibly good. I can't explain how good they were, but I'll try.

The first was The Shawshank Redemption. This film follows a man named Andy, wrongly jailed for the murder of his wife. He meets other prisoners who really did commit murders, including Red, an older man who has quite a while left in his sentence. They quickly become friends. Andy takes everything given to him without complaint, and maintains hope that his name will eventually be cleared. He braves abuse to talk to guards until he gets on their good side. An older prisoner is released from his life sentence and commits suicide because he can't handle the pressure of being free. Eventually, his background in banking becomes a tool for corruption. After a prisoner arrives who has evidence for his wife's actual murder and is ignored (and murdered) by the warden, he takes matters into his own hands. He escapes through a tunnel he had been digging for years and withdraws all the illegitimate funds that he stole from his prison. He leaves some for Red, who is released later.

The movie is an excellent commentary on the prison situation in the United States and on the idea of justice as a whole. What is fair isn't always what it seems, as these prisoners were forced to endure far worse than they ever thought they would. If you play the objective justice game, you don't want to feel bad, because they retain their lives. The film does a great job at generating empathy for the human condition and an enmity towards institutions that strip that away. There was no good guy in this movie, only people with different types of actions.

The second movie also centered around an institutional problem: the situation with banks and traders in the years leading up to the 2008 housing crash. The common American did not set up the problem that they were forced to deal with. Like in Shawshank Redemption, otherwise normal people were taken advantage of by those in a higher echelon, whether through lies, coercion, or being preyed upon for their ignorance. Immigrants signed horribly flawed loans. Bankers kept money bet on the fact that those people would pay their mortgages. Nobody won. The only people who escaped with a profit were those who were willing to bet on the total failure of an entire society. They got rich, but they weren't excited about it. They were right, which meant widespread suffering. 

I was born in 2005. I had my 3rd birthday that summer. I couldn't care less about a housing crisis because I was completely ignorant to it. 

I find ignorance to be a very hard concept. There is so much suffering in the world, it is hard to condemn those who choose not to acknowledge it. I don't have the ability to do that; I have no choice but to see those problems, and sometimes I envy those who can live and never pay attention to everything. I wish that I could ignore things and trust that everything will work out, but I don't. Instead, I trust that I will do the best I can with what's there. I know that I think things through and that I will make the best choices when I can. I also think that if more of the world was willing to do that, there would be fewer problems. Sometimes, one must forget their ignorance and forget their own happiness to make the most informed choice they can. Hope isn't enough. You have to experience things, even bad things, so that you can know you're doing the best you can. If you live in perpetual financial security, you'll never support a charity. If you don't meet people different from you, you'll never vote on their behalf, you'll never condemn prejudice, and you'll never feel comfortable interacting with them. Confronting uncomfortable beliefs is also how you find your own. You will rarely realize someone else was right, but you should often realize that you were wrong. Being right isn't always a good thing. If you're right because 6 million people lost their homes and the world economy tanked, was that a good thing? Didn't think so.

We visited Normandy this last week. It was very cool. The weather was insane, with crazy rain and very strong wind. Of course I still went for walks outside and walked on the beach. Nobody wanted to go with me, but I didn't care. Who else can say they played their harmonica on Omaha Beach? Just me.

I was walking in the cemetery of all of the American soldiers and thought, "oh, it would be interesting if I saw someone's last name that I knew, I doubt it will happen though, since you can only read the closest ones." Just as I thought that, I looked up. My name was on the grave. Well, as close as it could possibly be. The man's name was William Otto. It stopped me in my tracks and my heart sank.

He was an engineer. He died not long after D-Day, on a day with minimal action. He was reported missing after a potential skirmish with a few leftover German soldiers in the area. He didn't even get to go home afterwards to his wife, and they didn't have any children. His obituary mentioned how much he hated the war and how he felt very torn in his participation in it. He missed his home and didn't want to kill anyone else, but he understood that the institution of Nazi Germany was evil.

I felt very similar to this fellow. It was like looking at my own corpse. I hate war. I'm some kind of engineer. I don't have a wife, but I hope to someday, and here was a guy whose beliefs I understood. He was dead and I wasn't. In one small, unreported incident, his experiences were stopped short and snippd from the fabric of life. He was only a few years older than I am. It was terrifying to realize that the only differences between me and this guy were that I was born in 2005 and didn't have an extra O at the end of my name. It was especially scary to recognize that they didn't see it coming. I am very lucky that I have yet to be put in a box and shipped toward my potential death. 

I've thought a lot about intentional suffering recently. With all of this death and sadness in the world, there is enough without you adding to it. People shouldn't make things harder than they have to be. It makes me sad when I see people piling on expectations, holding themselves to very high standards, or intentionally making things harder for themselves just because they think things aren't hard enough. There seems to be an attitude amongst many people my age that they need to be struggling to be doing it "right". I don't think that's true. I think that people should minimize the pain they go through and inflict on each other. More importantly, don't make other people work harder just because you are. Don't add stress for other people just because you deem their lives too easy.

Anyways, that's probably all. This sat in my drafts for like a week so I should probably just send it.

-william