Our family flew to Europe this summer for a little over two weeks of vacation time. We ended up visiting Paris and three cities in Italy, for roughly three-four days apiece.

As part of what is hopefully my last term of my undergraduate education, I’m taking a political philosophy course. As part of the general outline of the course, our professor introduced the broad overarching conflict that we’d be studying in several works, one that he phrased as Individual Rights versus Community.

So people who’ve known me for awhile know that I’ve taken a long time to finish undergrad - this spring marks my 12th quarter in my sixth year at the University of Chicago, and along the way I’ve taken two leaves of absence spanning a total of more than a year to work and figure out what’s wrong.

I just happened upon Analytics Made Skeezy, a blog written by John Foreman, Chief Scientist at MailChimp. He posts every so often detailing various techniques used in analytics, ranging from revenue management using price elasticity estimation to clustering and community detection.

Well this is a few weeks late! My father and I went to Chile for my spring break for about a week - between March 22nd and March 29th - to go hiking in Torres del Paine National Park.

It’s been a long time since I talked about this, but I’ve been re-writing Animurecs in PHP, having gotten fed up with feeling like I was working around Rails to get things done.

So I’m taking classes this winter and spring; finally on track to finish my BA in math. One of the classes I’m taking is an intro sociology class - one of the overarching goals of the course is to understand the interplay between parenting and education, and how these two factors help children become successful later in life.

I’ve been an active member of an online social forum called End of the Internet for a few years now. The site is particularly interesting because it’s both closed off to the public and has been relatively long-lived despite the lack of new users; the active posters on the site have been around since the site’s founding in early 2004, and watching the topics of discussion shift as the userbase grows and ages has been really interesting.

Representative Jeff Flake (R-Ariz) led a House vote on Thursday to pass an amendment prohibiting the NSF from funding political science research.