Got up at 8.
First up was going to a CS talk. It was by a cornell prof. on concensus theory. He actually made it quite interesting, although it’s a field of CS that I probably won’t end up using much in my career. It’s dealing with how you can have a collection of unreliable processors come to agreement on a value. It’s used by google / yahoo / any other large cloud computing system. He did a nice proof of why the problem was impossible, and then a few examples of how you could implement solutions if you added additional restrictions (typically a maximum number of faulty hosts.)
Went back to the dorm, did work on my disp and got myself organized over lunch, and then met with my disp tutor mid afternoon. We went around to a few DVD shops in the area and interviewed the shop owners about their feelings of movie distribution. They all said their movies were ‘legal’ and it sounds like it may even be true much to my surprise – the deal as I understand it right now is that Chinese dvd suppliers work under much the same system as russian music, that is there is a flat fee artists association that can be payed rather than actually dealing with foreign license holders. They said legal dvds might go up to 12kuai but were still quite cheap.
had hotpot on campus for dinner, it was really good.
Then in the evening went to a chinese acrobatics show. (The program bought us all tickets for the show, it was at least as cool as the one I saw last time in shanghai, the stuff is ridiculous.)
Came back afterward and hung out for a bit, heading to bed now.