In 6 hours I leave for China for CDC. A stack of fresh 100 Yuan notes (Mao Zedong instead of Ben Franklin), a worn passport, which bore many visas since 2003, a bunch of electronic gadgets, melatonine and caffeine pills, all contribute to a spy-story atmosphere that is one of the perks of being a graduate student. Also, a nice haircut, a clean shave, and a Caltech sweater will make the TSA people feel safe and not trigger any profiling rules.

High points of the past few days:

• The homework for this term ended with an Escher-textured Stanford bunny using discrete conformal mapping (homework for CS177). Maybe not that impressive, but satisfying after all that theory.

• An effort to gather a variety of images with a certain fixed focal length degenerated in something much more fun.