Joseph Javier Perla

I love that line.

I am using Python right now to experiment with a new idea. My friend Greg proposes that there be a stronger link between the file system and the Internet, the cloud, accessible from anywhere.
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It’s tragic that scientists exist.

People often think that science is about chemicals in test tubes and electricity flowing through big coils and massive explosions. This is not science. Science is grounded solely in the Scientific Method.
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I think Investment Banks do some good things for the world. I disagree with how they sometimes view the world and interact with people. They can become dishonest and empty.

I received the e-mail below from JP Morgan today. It’s a standard invitation to apply to one of their leadership programs. I’m probably on some big list of theirs. This is all fine, except that this recruitment manager claimed she “wanted to personally tell” me about the program. This is a lie to feign sincerity. There is nothing personal about this message.

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I was researching intelligence quotient and IQ tests on Wikipedia. I stumbled upon, as one always does on Wikipedia, an interesting kind of IQ test: Raven’s Progressive Matrices.

It had a link at the bottom to an iq test: http://www.iqtest.dk/main.swf. It’s pretty interesting. I recommend you check it out. You know how I feel about IQ tests. So, I decided to figure out how it works. It’s actually pretty simple. I think that anyone smart can follow my simple tricks and figure out how to get a perfect score pretty easily and well under the time limit of 40 minutes.
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I was eating in the Center for Jewish Life at Princeton the other day last Spring. I was eating with Chris, who was introducing me to his friend Yue. He’s a brilliant guy who had taken Graph Theory the year before. We were asking him questions about a problem that troubled us.
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I moved into the Bridgewater-provided housing yesterday on Fairfield Beach. Mouse over or click for captions.

For my Physics 210 class, my team and I built a self-balancing robot. It stands on two wheels, and constantly adjusts itself so that it does not fall over, like a Segway. Building something that moves by itself and reacts to its environment is fun and very cool. The link to our final project report is below:

http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dgbtdz37_23pmw7j

Below is my schedule for the Fall 2006 semester. ORF 309 is Probability and Stochastic Systems, and a requirement for the Engineering and Management Systems and Finance certificates. Art 210 covers Italian Painting and Sculpture. PHY 209 is a Pass/Fail seminar on Computational Physics, so it should be a very relaxed, fun class. My last Computer Science prerequisite is COS 217, covering the fundamentals of low-level computing. A more fun COS class will probably be COS 402, Artificial Intelligence. Finally, I’m taking PHI 203 for broadening my philosophical knowledge. The course is entitled Epistemology and Metacognition.

In other news, the campus looks beautiful on this spring day. Pretty pink flower petals float around Frist. This is very unusual weather for New Jersey.

My tentative classe schedule for my next four years here is now up. I am signing up to major in Computer Science in the B.S.E. program here, while keeping the option to switch to Operations Research and Financial Engineering by taking those required courses simultaneously. I’m also looking at a mathematics, computing, robotics, and Woodrow Wilson school certificates.

The William Lowell Putnam Math Competition is an incredibly difficult 6-hour mathematics examination for college students. Last December, over 3500 undergraduates from across the country, most of them majoring in math, sat for the test. Of them, most receive 0 points of a possible 120. Nobody has ever achieved a perfect score.
I also took the exam last year, with the goal of scoring at least 1 point in order to best the average. Instead, I scored a whopping 19 points, placing me around the top 500. A few Princeton undergrads did significantly better, acing most of the test and scoring among the top 10 in the nation. I admire their hard work and logical genius.

Princeton’s new Student Course Guide was released recently. I made that in some spare time, updating often to make it easier to use and more functional. It sports over 2000 courses and even more sections, with over 5000 potential users all interacting to help each other. I’m guessing that the new SCG will accumulate many thousands of reviews. For now, everyone seems to appreciate it.

The Princeton Pre-Business Society took a trip to New York City to visit Lehman Brothers.
A number of employees set up a Market Trading Simulation, where we all ran around buying and selling oil contracts, S&P futures, and 10-Year T-bills. Some people acted as salespeople, who interacted with the “customers.” Lehman employees played the role of the customers: T Rowe Price, SAC Capital, etc. They gave orders on what to buy and what to sell, and in what amounts, to the salespeople. Salespeople, after creating a connection with the customer, relayed this order information to the trader in his or her respective “pit.” The S&P pit roared with energy as everyone bought and sold thousands of shares. On the other hand, the other two pits hardly moved from their starting prices. Afterwards, we had an opportunity to talk with some of the employees who told us about their jobs. Many were in fixed income, which relies heavily on the quantitative, mathematical side of the investment banking business.
The experience ended up very chaotic. When I played the role of a trader, my balance sheet made no sense, with missing blocks of trades. I think a simple computer interface could make this really easy, effective, and avoid the hassle of recording every transaction.

I saw Avenue Q tonight on Broadway. Princeton subsidized the trip, so I only paid $25 to go and see it. The show has its highs and lows, but mostly funny.

I may have over-extended myself this week. Details coming soon.

It snowed yesterday!

This first week has been very, very hard. I have to go work now, too. Hopefully, I can get more sleep and write more next week.

Woohoo! Spring classes have started!

The Princeton Registration website just updated where my classes will be. Here are my classes again:




My classes are here:




Click on the picture to get a larger view of the image. H is my dorm, and each number stands for a class, indicated on my schedule. As you can see, my classes are pretty close together, with my only long, quick journey being between Linear Algebra and Computer Science, 2 and 3. But that probably only takes about 7 minutes, a workable walk.

I took my last final exam of my first semester here, MAT 201 Multivariable Calculus. It went pretty well. I’m glad to be doen with exams, although it means I have only three and a half more years here.

My classes for Spring 2006 next semester look exciting: