December 2025

Ideas and interests

As I discussed in my previous now post, I have been spending more time with people and catching up with folks. I’ve had a lot of coffee chats in the last couple of weeks and that’s given me lots of inspiration for things to write here, to the detriment of my actual research. You should see those posts soon.

I’ve also come to the realization that this is the perfect time for me to audit and take courses that have nothing to do with my immediate academic and professional interests. As it turns out, that is not the task of an undergraduate, it is a task for the graduate student. I have no course requirements on account of my credit transfer from my Master’s degree, and I’ve already taken basically all of the practical courses that I could want. So I’m indulging a bit in my tangential interests, and I’ll be auditing PHIL 288A next quarter with Prof. Nadeem Hussain. The course is titled Explanation and, based on the course description, will explore with greater care and detail some of the ideas that I’ve been thinking and writing about, e.g., in my recent post about the phenomenology of math. I may audit some additional courses.

Home for the holidays

I have returned to my family home in Ohio for the holidays, where I have been reunited with my furry friends:

I feel like a completely different person when I visit Ohio versus when I’m out in California. It doesn’t exactly feel like I step into a different personality when my flight lands. Rather, it feels more pronounced, as if I am not the same person in one place versus the other. I have all the memories of California me, but it feels like that was lived by someone else. This reminds me of the teletransportation paradox. Apparently, the answer is quite obvious: of course I wouldn’t be the same person were I to be obliterated and reconstructed atom-by-atom somewhere else. I’m not even the same person when I travel by plane intact!

Current research

I’ve been a little bit irresponsible about doing my actual research projects, instead focusing on some pure math research projects that I initiated before starting the PhD. My advisor is supportive of my working on these projects but would probably prefer that I spend more time on our collaborative projects. That being said, one of the projects that has been haunting me since early 2024 (namely, cooperative transaction cost mitigation) is finally coming to an end. We’ll look to get it onto arXiv soon. I have also been working on a project that fits good covariance matrices to the increments of state data (e.g., log-returns from log-prices) that are asynchronous and irregularly spaced.

Books and music

I include this bit in my /now posts as an outlet to discuss what I’m reading and what song or songs have recently been looping in my 24/7 brain radio. (It gets a little annoying and I have no idea how to turn it off.) Maybe occasionally I’ll have some other stuff to put here.

Current books and music

Reading. Currently, I am reading Human Action by Ludwig von Mises. It’s currently free for Audible members, and von Mises is one of those figures that you just have to read at some point in your life. This is a massive book and I’ve only just started, so I don’t have any particular thoughts on it at the moment. I am sure that I’ll have some thoughts to share later.

I also just finished (re)reading The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, since I’ve been writing a post about the notation of the derivative, although frankly I am not sure it is of much help for that purpose except for the vocabulary of design. There’s not a tangible thing to map the notation onto; our conception of mathematical ideas doesn’t seem to lend well to an obvious choice of notation.

In reading The Design of Everyday Things, I found it quite obvious from the words Norman uses and the way he frames certain ideas that he has an engineering background. Interestingly, I just learned that Michael I. Jordan was one of his doctoral students.

Listening. For the first week or two of December, what was stuck in my head was this nightcore version of Where Did You Go (Shinzo Radio Edit) by Empyre One x Global Rockerz x Enerdizer. Currently, my brain jukebox is strangely quiet… I am not sure whether that is good or bad.

Reflections on this year

Since it is now the end of the year, I’d like to briefly reflect here on the media I’ve consumed the last year.

YouTube. For better or for worse, I watched a lot of YouTube this last year. The two big channels for me this past year were Big A and Kane B. Big A scratched my brainrot itch while still providing some genuinely good, insightful analysis, while Kane B is just the GOAT of YouTube philosophy. I can’t believe I discovered his channel only this year. I’ve just about binged his entire channel since I found it.

I also spent a good bit of time during the first half of the year listening to the Within Reason podcast hosted by Alex O’Connor, particularly those featuring Christian scholars. I am not quite sure what reignited any kind of interest in Christianity. I am not a religious person, and I am still exploring what kinds of metaphysical statements I am willing to endorse. I do find it interesting to hear about why people join or remain in the Christian faith specifically, perhaps because I grew up as a Christian.

When I was otherwise braindead and didn’t feel particularly like doing anything, I watched GranaDy (and his second channel). I have found him to be the most consistently entertaining Trackmania streamer.

Reading. This is the first year in a while that I’ve been consistently reading again. I used to read (listen to) over 100 books a year during high school, since at that time I was a long-distance runner and had many hours on the trails to listen to audiobooks. These days it’s trickier since I have trouble focusing on audiobooks while lifting.

Nevertheless, I finished around 20 books this year (I lost the habit of tracking my reading). My favorite of these was The Trial by Franz Kafka. I quite enjoy this kind of dreamlike story; I was reminded of The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro (which I’m sure drew influence from Kafka). I also read it around the same time I was listening to a lot more of the Within Reason podcast, so I read it as a religious allegory, which unsurprisingly has been discussed before me.

Listening. This year was the year of J-core for me.

• The song that I kept replaying, and the one which I can perhaps credit as introducing me to this niche within the harder styles, was Grievous Lady by Team Grimoire and Laur.
• My top album for this year was Het Ergste Moet Nog Komen by Sefa,¹ which was technically released last year but I didn’t hear the full album until this year. My favorite track of the album is Symphony of Life.
• According to my YouTube Music recap, Camellia was my top artist this year.

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