A Plea For a Forty-Eight Hour Day
The now decommissioned K computer of the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science currently holds the title of the the 20th most powerful supercomputer in the world, as ranked in the June 2019 TOP500 list. In 2014, researchers utilized the computer to perform a highly accurate simulation of one percent of one second of human brain activity.
Computation time? Forty minutes.
It took forty minutes to simulate a sliver of a sliver of the most complex known structure in the universe using a supercomputer. What can we surmise about this?
Well I conclude that a lot of people are wasting what they are given. Should there not be a primal urge to utilize something so complex that billions of iterations of itself scattered around the planet for thousands of years have yet to understand even an iota of itself?
This line of reasoning is what leads me to my conundrum. These last few weeks have been among the best I have ever experienced, at the expense of passing by extremely quickly. By virtue of everything being new, (the people, the culture, the weather, and even the geography), there is a perpetual sense, at least within my mind, that there is something going on. There are simply no days to be lackadaisical.
It does not just take an incredible amount of willpower to bike up a hill every morning. What sits atop the hill also matters. In my case, this is a rich conglomeration of an unwillingness to fail a class and a genuine curiosity for what will be discussed next time. My Introduction to Communication class has been one of my most curious experiences, as the subject matter itself is hardly something that interests me in a vacuum, but combined with the flamboyance of my professor and the natural elevation of the subject by my very existence being in UC San Diego, the subject becomes something beyond itself.

I am part of something bigger than me. I am reminded of it every time I bike across Warren mall and I can gaze across the massive engineering research facilities. I am reminded of it when I am able to find a physical copy of books that I had been studying by PDFs at Geisel library. I am reminded of it every time I must hold on by the tips of my fingernails to understand the logical arguments put forth by one of the eight four-time Putnam fellows in history.
And that is precisely what it is. Everything is so much realer now. Everything is almost too real. Surreal.
Opportunities are more lucrative and numerous, consequences are more extreme, and the leverage I have over myself–my capacity to govern what I do and when I do it–is now being put to the test.
So my conundrum is this: on my shoulders is the capacity to do precisely what I want. But do I keep up with the colorful avenues of life offered through interesting people and experiences? Or do I keep my head down and just plow through work, math, and physics? To which endeavor should I dedicate the supercomputer between my ears?
In the last few weeks, I have been socializing to an abnormal extent (at least by my own metrics). The people I have met are among the most understanding and lenient I have had the privilege of encountering, as by experience in high school, few people are willing to compromise with my interests and thus not discount me as a whole. But when one is elevated to some level beyond what he or she may be capable of, he or she runs a risk of crumbling a very delicate house of cards.
In particular, optimally, I need to be better than people think I am and as good as I want to be. Neither of these are currently true.
The solution is to lock myself up till late hours, crunching in the library and clacking away at the blackboards in empty lecture halls. But then I rob myself of my great escape. The escape from my former self and my arrival as a refugee here in San Diego. The ability to be more amicable and approachable and dabble in those things that I swore up and down, while back in Florida, would just be stupid distractions from my goals.
Compromise seems untenable. I cannot feel that I am fully invested in my work unless I am doing it at the expense of something else. This goes both ways: math/physics, as well as socialization. And doing things halfway is something I reserve for school assignments, not things that I genuinely care about. It is too bad that there are not simply forty-eight hours in a day.
So I’ll trudge forward, trying what I can. In the long run, I am certain that I will have to leave playthings behind, and focus on my real work. In any case, once my two years of guaranteed housing are up, I’ll have more room to stretch my legs (metaphorically, since in a literal sense, I unfortunately have far too much room to stretch my legs).
In two years, no distractions. Everything will be on me.