Corn Maze

Whoa, such a busy week -- it's so weird how the middle of the semester is *always* exponentially harder than the beginning! Anyway, the highlight of this week was a wickedly awesome talk on cancer survival theory by Straum from Harvard -- he's been my hero since undergrad, and he actually autographed my cancer textbook (sqeee ^_^) -- I shall have to post pictures later on, since the man is beyond cool.

In other news, went with M., S., and some other MD/PhD students to a 10-acre corn maze in Rantoul!

Basically, the objective of the maze was to find six different hole-punching stations (in order to complete a punch card) and subsequently return to the entrance -- the thing is, we went after sunset, and it was horridly fun running around with flashlights with absolutely no sense of direction. I guess one could find an optimal method of traversing the maze by treating the maze bifurcations as nodes and using branch-and-bound methods from graph theory (a la traveling salesman problem) . . .

. . . but I suppose it's ok to use stochastic methods instead (^^) Down with elegance! Boo! Hiss!