Let see, it’s been a fairly quite few days overall.
Classes, concluding with a chinese weekly quiz this morning which went quite well.
Made progress on my disp, talked to a law student in IP law today for an hour. That was really interesting and has changed my perceptions on what’s going on a lot. turns out stuff is regulated at least in the country to a level I had totally not realized before. he thinks that china’s copyright laws are too strict (copyright period here is 50 years, he was saying that as a developing country it really shouldn’t be even in the same ballpark as america’s 70 years.)
core lecture today was on the peking opera, which was interesting.
did math yesterday, that was interesting as expected.
Oh, and went to a combinatorics lecture this morning. It was by Prof. Han. turns out he’s fairly famous though I didn’t remember that I’d heard of him until I got into the lecture. (it was the same topic that I’d got to a lecture frosh. year from a guy called igor pak from mit. that lecture went totally over my head – I couldn’t understand him even though he was explaining it in english.)
This one was a bit better (although in chinese.) although I still feel like I’m missing a big chunk. It’s on the hook length theorem, which this guy proved and then made several important conjectures. The combinatorics part is that these conjectures turn out to be really general and prove basically everything as specific cases.
I found out about the lecture in a post on the BBS. it turned out to be on the fifth floor of the main academics building in a small conference room. There were 5 profs and 5 grad students and me. (the prof is a chinese guy who is teaching in france right now btw.)
it was definately interesting stuff. I think that the style of the lecture was at least as cool as the content, since I can’t say I really internalized much of that.
otherwise – well, homework is done for this week. I’ve got a bag of sweetpotato chips I picked up fresh from a street vendor that I’ve been snacking on and are delicious.
my phone just got it’s first problem. I think the internal “is your face next to the phone” sensor broke, which means that I can talk but the internal speaker doesn’t activate (I can’t hear the other person). So I have to either turn on speakerphone or plug in headphones. Not the end of the world but a minor nuisance.