Careless Mistakes.

Careless mistakes are defined as unexpected, unintentional and simple to make errors.

Careless mistakes don't matter as much as we think because we are always capable of them, we will always make them, we cannot prevent ourselves entirely from making them, and in the long run we'll unavoidably make plenty.

Without careless mistakes, I would have got perfect scores every single time. I have concluded that careless mistakes are random errors that reduce precision, but never accuracy. They still follow an approximated normal distribution. Accuracy always matters far more than precision (both matter but not the same), and if it isn't, it just means you need a better algorithm/computer to do the arithmetic or calculations.

Careless mistakes are the most intelligent bugs there are. While they may disappear from a certain piece of code, they can always hide in you. They run away or teleport away when you detect them, but there's always somewhere they would hide. We should not be annoyed at them, but instead calibrate accordingly. We should always allow ourselves the time to calibrate for them (also called testing and debugging), instead of forcing ourselves as human beings into situations without chance of correction.

The smarter you are, the smarter your bugs are. But it is always possible to remove bugs from a particular piece of code because we always tend to know what we want the program to do, but we can never quite pin down EXACTLY what we want, because we are not exactly defined ourselves.

What's the maximum number of computations that can be done on a certain piece of data?

Roommate conversations

Recently, my dorm was refuge to a few guys who had been locked out by their respective roommates because they brought home their girlfriend. That's happening in the middle of mid-terms week and has been devastating to their studies.

So don't forget to talk to your roommate about laying down some ground rules of bringing girlfriends in. Things like giving advanced notice, evacuation timezone and setting the time period they get their room to themselves.

However unlikely you or your roommate think that is, unexpected occurrences can have lasting impacts on the roommate relationship.

Elements of a good student society

Market demand estimation
Individual dedication of members
- decreases with time and then levels off.
Must not interfere with studies.
Must somehow appear to help with studies. (CAS hours, or mentoring, or studies related activities)
Must be engaging. Interactive. Dynamic. Ever-fresh. Unique.
- people must look forward to its events, and not be so low in priority that people think it's a stump in their calendar.
Understand the demand of its members.
Must be aware of competition
- people only have limited time and budgets to use on societies.
Must have organizer type manager-geniuses (at least 1).

People need to actually like to be in the club, and not there for their CVs, or for the social network. Otherwise, even if the club has a huge budget (eg. Student Union) and manpower, they cannot fulfill their target market.