There’s not much to update this week, I’ve mostly just been doing lifestyle adjustments in preparation for my remote internship, which starts for me in a week. Comments are open for the first time on this blog. This was definitely a daunting decision to make, but I found it worthwhile. My social media addiction post last week got a really good response; I have two comments on the post and several other people reaching out to me on private channels, and some good conversations started.

## Trying to understand social media addiction

I’ve spent a little bit of time combing through research papers about social media, mostly by using Google Scholar. I didn’t have a particular goal in mind when setting out on this exploration, but I was primarily interested in the links between social media usage and mental health, as well as the analysis of social media addiction (how prevalent it is, its forms, patterns that differ among cultures and are common along cultural lines, etc).

## Logs 2020-05-11: Sequences of Sets

Here’s a quick little math one. In a probability theory class that I was sitting in on, one of the core concepts taught was the limit infimum and limit supremum of a sequence of sets. If $$A_n$$ is a sequence of sets (that are all subsets of some larger set $$E$$) then the two constructs are also known as $$A_n$$ almost always and $$A_n$$ infinitely often respectively.

## Logs 2020-04-27: Learning Kaggle

This past week I tried my hand at the Titanic Kaggle competition. The goal of this contest is to predict whether a given passenger on the Titanic survived the disaster based on data collected about the attributes of passengers. Here I’ll be writing some of my reflections on my experience for those in a similar situation; doing this has made me realize that ML sometimes has some pretty strange nuances.

## Quarantine Logs 2020-04-20

I’m going to try to do this weekly. I’m not the kind of person to be able to pull out a full-fledged technical project with a write-up every week (last week was more of a half-finished technical project with a full-fledged write-up, to be honest), so a lot of these weekly posts will be a lot more chill. Tomorrow, I have my very last final exam of my undergrad (go me!

## Quarantine Logs 2020-04-13: Circuit-Sim Progress!

Been a week! This is by far the most frequently I’ve ever posted. I’m hoping to keep it up.

I’m happy to update that I made a little progress on the circuit simulator I’ve been working on. Here I’ll get into some of what that’s all about in a little bit more detail. All the relevant code is up on Github, though it’s really bare-bones and without documentation as of the time of writing.

Learning about circuit analysis introduced me to the concept of nodes. A node is a point in a circuit where two or more components meet. This concept is important because of Kirchhoff’s Current Law, which states that the sum of currents leaving a node is 0.

$$\text{Current leaving node i} = \sum_{j \in N(i)} I_{i,j} = 0$$

Here’s an example: