Recently, I had the privilege of writing for the MIT Mystery Hunt, a roughly 72-hour puzzling extravaganza that occurs on MIT’s campus every year on MLK weekend. My team Cardinality won last year, which meant that, per tradition, we had the “honor” of organizing and running this year’s hunt.
During a couple of summers in college, my housemates and I cooked at home, and I realized how much of our food landed in the trash. As a kid, I almost never saw this happening at home; wasted food meant wasted money and wasted labor, from all the folks who harvested, transported, and prepared the ingredients.
Last year, I stumbled upon this 3Blue1Brown video (and its follow-up) about the game Wordle. The narrator explains how to find the optimal first guess using information theory. At the time, I had discovered another word guessing game called Semantle; unlike Wordle, which gives hints based on what letters the guesses share with the target word, Semantle gives hints based on how similar in meaning the guesses are to the target word.
My last class in college examined the relationship between food and the environment, with Prof. Christopher Gardner.1 On the first day, we were introduced to planetary boundaries — a set of 8-9 dimensions of the Earth that includes climate change — in Springmann et al.
“One at a time please!”
My dad translates for my great aunt, who we’re visiting in Asia, to the rest of the family. She’s having trouble understanding the 5-way conversation, and while my lack of fluency in her native language doesn’t help, I know her weaker hearing is the main factor.