#109 Sun (10/9/22) - Jinglun is back in town! Black Dog lunch.

For a brief visit with his gf, he will be back later this month for her birthday.

He is doing well at Harvard.  We went to lunch at Black Dog in Champaign.

Talked a lot about his classes, structure, materials, methods. He told me about a breakthrough in reinforcement learning by AlphaTensor/Deepmind using RL to solve a matrix multiplication problem that is much more efficient.

Also talked about the difficulties in China with the lockdowns and why Chinese students are not coming here as much. All his classmates are Chinese, about 100 in his program.  He suggested that FE is one of the most difficult subjects because of the need for coding, math, prob and fin.  Data science just needs coding/DS.

I told him about my new puppy and he was very happy for me.  Shared some of the pics, which he liked.

Forgot to get a pic with him.  He was wearing a white Harvard sweatshirt, that looked really good.  His hair is shorter and his skin is better, he looked healthy and happy.  Said he is not as stressed right now because he has a good understanding of the material.  They use a recitation/lab structure, what we called a flipped classroom, where they give out the notes ahead, students read notes and discuss problems in class meetings.

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Introduced puppy (Xtina calls him Duncan, now) to Morrigan and it went rather well. No hostilities, they had a nice walk together and gave each other plenty of room and respect.  Morrigan is always a bit reluctant to engage.  Gets fussy and wants lap. Went to Courier for lunch with Mike and X Saturday and then played runaround for them to get their vaccine shots which involved several trips and long wait.


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