For today, work consisted of going down to Semiahmoo Secondary in South Surrey/White Rock and talking to several Planning 10 classes. I went with Rich from Engineering, who talked about the Faculty of Applied Sciences at SFU, with me running the Computing Science demo, which was the Towers of Hanoi problem.

Before I continue further, some people may go “What the hell does the Towers of Hanoi have anything to do with Computing Science?” Well, it teaches students about recursion and is an example of a problem that you can solve, since CS is about solving problems.

But anyway, the visits went quite well. The kids enjoyed the Hanoi problem and it is truly interesting to see just how people in the audience think it is easy, then suddenly come up and think for a long while.

So this being quite possibly the first time I had to drive down south of the Fraser from Vancouver in various points in the day, here are some observations; these may be good things to note, because I surely did not realize some of this:

• Even when you would expect to be going in the opposite direction of where the traffic flows (since people in the suburbs would be heading towards Vancouver in the morning), you still run into traffic jams. While heading down in the morning, I hit traffic problems on the Knight Street bridge as well as Highway 99 at the George Massey Tunnel.
• Despite the fact that the speed limits were 100km/h, I still found myself and others barreling down the highway at a good 120-140km/h. (I had to anyway, the traffic problems made me late by a good 10 minutes)
• Counterflows suck (when you have only one lane and the other side has three).
• Avoid the merge lane(s) if you want to go through faster.
• People will do anything to avoid the huge lines. When going back to Vancouver at the end of the day, some cars were trying to go down an already closed lane (for the counterflow) and merging in somewhere up front. So here’s a message to pretty much all drivers: if a car is going down a closed lane just to cut in line, DON’T LET THEM IN. Letting them in encourages them to do it again because they got rewarded for it. In psychology (operant conditioning specifically), they call this positive reinforcement. If you don’t let them in, they will probably not do it anymore, because they get screwed.

All in all, an interesting day. I nearly fell asleep while driving too. Kinda scary, when you’re on the highway going at 110 km/h and you find yourself drifting off the lane. Thank God there were no cars nearby and I ended up not getting into any crashes or accidents.

Well, better get to sleep. We have more classes to talk to tomorrow, this time with the usual presentation.