The Integrative Stream

Slowing down? Can’t be.

MIT definitely keeps you busy. After spending all day Saturday at a Biomedical Enterprise Program retreat, Sunday and Monday (which was supposedly a “day off”) went to academics. Yesterday was twelve solid hours from door to door, including an evening career development office dinner (another of those this evening, one more tomorrow), followed by a few hours polishing up the various things I needed to hand in today. As of right now I’m all caught up, and if I don’t slack off I can build up a comfortable margin by the weekend.

The problems people have depend on where they come from. The pure engineers aren’t all that happy with accounting, a domain where numbers do not necessarily obey the various laws of thermodynamics. I had a strange problem on some relatively simple probability questions in a data analysis class, since years of programming in C-descended programming languages have trained me to read the | symbol as “or.” I even use it in handwritten notes. In probability, it means “given.” You can waste a lot of time by reading “A given B” as “A or B”. Little stuff, but it shows.

All the MBA work has left me little time to read, think, or otherwise produce new material for this web site. Things are starting to shake out a little bit, so that should change.