
For every week this semester I observed a heavily modified version of the Sabbath. This was done primarily because I committed to the idea in public and I have an odd sense of honor. It was also an experiment in a burn-the-ships approach to internet addiction and an attempt to get closer to both the religion of my ancestors and religion in general (I spent the morning of one Saturday reading the Gospel of Mark).

The rules of the "Davidism Sabbath," as dubbed by my CS lecturer, were as follows:

Turn off my phone and laptop sometime Friday afternoon or evening, typically 5:30pm, often as late as 7:30 or as early as 3:30.

Turn them back on 24 hours later.

That's it.

I liked to imagine my weekly "Sabbath" as a kind of sleep for the week. A reset, if you will. Occasionally, when I was extremely tired, it was a time for sleep for the weak. There were multiple Saturdays where the lack of blue light blasting at me from a rectangle forced me to reckon with the realities of my own body. I slept because I couldn't read, couldn't exercise, and didn't have an easy out. My brother once said he just took a nap whenever he was too tired to read something complicated, and on Saturdays and Saturdays alone I lived that lifestyle.

The more useful kind of sleep was the break. The last semester I was at UMD I felt a constant need to be working on something. No matter what time it was, I could be doing homework, and there was always a small part of me that whispered I should be doing homework, or applying to internships, or any number of things besides whatever I was doing at that moment. Forcing myself away from the internet did not completely alleviate those voices, but it certainly made it so that there were fewer of them. There is something freeing about being unable to do much; being forced to stop working on the concerns of space and start working on a "palace in time" (Heschel, *The Sabbath*).

There's some interesting stuff going on in my palace in time. I do a lot of reading there, and the kind of reading I do there is different. There's a certain kind of enjoyment one gains from truly immersing oneself in a book. It's a kind of enjoyment I've been blessed to experience often throughout life. In this case, it happens with a wider range of books than normal. In darkness, dim lights shine like beacons. There are beautiful things that happen to my mind when I read deeply. It's one of the few things that makes my internal world more exciting while also making me calmer.

Like any palace, mine has walls. Throughout the semester I've been obsessed with different things throughout the week. Whether it be when I watched an abridged version of the entire *One Piece* anime, or my recent obsession with semiconductor stocks, these obsessions are often on the internet. They do not get past the walls of the palace.

During the week the flow of information is as an ocean of water. I do not drink. At best I swim, and often I get carried away. It's hard to overstate the amount of stimulus that enters my brain when I open my laptop. It is not unreasonable for me to be tracking eight different stocks at all times of day (the Korean stock market opens at 8pm), perusing responses from multiple AI models, ostensibly working on an English assignment, reading tweets about the Knicks, and playing a hand of online poker at the same time. I do love that kind of experience, but it lacks heft. If you carry that many things on your mind they have to be light.

The Sabbath also provides a discontinuity in time. I am bad with continuous things. I can internalize the probability of many discrete events, but once you get them trending towards infinity I lose that kind of deep understanding. I likewise struggle with the continuity of time. I often lose weeks to a feeling of similar days blending together. The break in time provided by this experiment helped with that. To butcher a phrase: there was a day of the week that was different from all other days.

![A visualization of a human life split into weeks](/images/writing/the-sabbath-weeks.png)

*Tim Urban, Wait But Why*

There is a collection of a certain type of image which I enjoy. One of them is this illustration by Tim Urban from Wait But Why. Another is the light cone:

![A themed light cone diagram showing past, present, future, and hypersurface](/images/writing/the-sabbath-lightcone.png)

They both provide a way of looking at time that I think is useful here.

We live at the center of the hourglass between two cones, but rarely do we spend much attention there. The cones are so much bigger, more enchanting. "Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia" (Sarah Urist Green), and imagining the past, well, yeah.

One of the realizations I've had as I've matured, a wonderful word for implying you're a better person than you used to be, is that all the damn cliches were right. Living life in the present is actually kinda great. Expect a future blog post on the apparently Quixotic task of instilling wisdom into words, or just read the Buddha.


A palace in time.

The Sabbath


## Deeper prompts

1. If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet?
2. What would constitute a “perfect” day for you?
3. If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?
4. Tell me one story from your life.

## Quick questions

1. What’s the greatest thing I probably don’t know about or appreciate?
2. What’s the last thing you did for the first time?
3. Where do you imagine yourself in retirement?
4. Would you rather be a hug dealer or a slug dealer?
5. Would you rather be in prison for something you did do or something you didn’t do?
6. If your whole life had to have background music with only one instrument, what kind of instrument would you pick? The music will vary in volume with activity, so it will never do anything like drown out conversation.
7. If you could change your birthday to be any day of the year, which would you pick?
8. What do you spend most of your free time on?
9. What motivates you?
10. What’s the most unconventional “career” you at least semi-seriously considered at some point in your life?
11. What’s something you wish people would be more honest about? You can answer once for people you know and once for society in general.
12. Motivated more by pride or envy?


Conversation Starters

Sometimes I like to imagine a conversation with a great philosopher of times gone by where I explain the miracle that is modern flight. It goes like this:

"We have these machines we call planes, great metal boats—"

"Wait, metal boats? That would never work. They'd sink, and besides we barely have enough for our knives."

"—that fly."

And then there's nothing I can do to convince them. This is clearly impossible. If it happened it must be an act of God.

---

Almost everyone I know hates flying. The cramped seating, the TSA, the crying kid who always manages to be in the seat next to you. I often fall victim to this mindset, too. 

What I want this post to be is an invitation to look from a different perspective. For you to _see_ what I see every time I'm on a plane that takes off. That whatever might be happening on a micro scale, on a macro scale what we — a bunch of overgrown apes — have built is nothing short of a miracle.

- - - 

At takeoff of every flight I listen to the New World Symphony by Dvořák. I'm actually listening to it right now. It's obviously inspired by the New World in an American sense but after so many flights to me it's almost an anthem of modernity. This, like everything else, is a matter of perspective. 

For example: you could be afraid of planes, think they're dangerous. Or you could realize that passenger planes are perhaps the safest form of transport mankind has ever invented. We have access to all of human knowledge in our pockets. We control the weather in our homes. You can tap a few buttons and someone will drive you basically anywhere. I mean even the produce aisle: I could get pineapples in Denmark! Denmark! Nothing grows there.

This is not to say things are all getting better: The TSA is worse than useless, we can't build housing, politics, algorithmic slop feeds, etc. But maybe every once in a while look from a different angle, zoom out. It would be a shame if you saw a cathedral and only focused on the part under construction. Sure it needs fixing, but you can't lose sight of the whole project, and sweet Jesus is it beautiful. 
- - -

So next time you're about to fall asleep on a flight and grumbling about the lack of leg room, remember: our ancestors looked up to the stars and dreamed of such things, now we just dream in such things.


On miracles

Planes!

Books 2026


IN the bible, Goliath challenges the Israelites to single combat to determine the outcome of the war. Goliath is, of course, a mountain of a man. Nine feet tall, the very height of historic warriors. He challenges the Israelites to single combat for 40 days, they cower in fear, etc. The Israelites are told that "The king will greatly enrich the man who kills him and will give him his daughter and make his family free in Israel" (I Samuel 17:25-26). David walks up and hits him with a rock from a distance. David and Goliath is now the basis for an entire subsystem of morality. This feels insane.

First of all, single combat is an excellent way of settling a war. Especially compared to what war actually is. Which at the time was mostly just peasants getting murdered by people with actual weaponry. Actually, cut the "at the time." It's always been peasants getting murdered by those with actual weaponry. Goliath, in offering single combat, is clearly doing something beneficial.

Second, Goliath isn't even the underdog in the story! Sure, David is a sheep farmer and Goliath is a nine-foot-tall professional warrior, but David has an omnipotent god on his side. It isn't even fair. Also, ranged weaponry is just superior.

Third, why do we give a shit about the underdog. It's a perversion of excellence and leads to so. much. bullshit. There are countless examples of obviously superior sports teams claiming to be "doubted". It drives me insane every time I hear it. I don't care if it's motivating, it's just lying to fit yourself into an ancient narrative that didn't even make sense in the first place. David's only the hero because of the side he's on! If Goliath had been an Israelite this would've been a tragedy.

Look, am I massively misunderstanding the foundational text of many major religions? Yes. Will I die inside next time the NBA champions talk about how no one believed in them? Definitely. Guys, you're seven feet tall, embrace Goliath a little. God knows, he also had issues finding shoes that fit. 


Someone's gotta stand up for the big guy

In Defense of Goliath


While sometimes I worry about anthropomorphising machines, I just as often worry about mechanizing people. Here's an incomplete list of place I see this happening. If you have more examples, email me.

- I try to learn similar to Reinforcement Learning
  - Basically there needs to be a tight feedback loop
  - Does taking lessons from machine learning and applying them to human learning make you less human?
- People write like ChatGPT
- We have self censorship on tiktok
  - i.e unalived, seggs, corn

Mechanized Humans

Cities

> If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything
> 
> — Ronald Coase

## Introduction

After long hours considering Max's statements on stock trading I came to the realization that I had one piece of information wallstreet could not dream of... attendance data for Prof. Morawski's CMSC320 lectures. So as every sane human being would I used Yahoo finance's API to fetch the closing price history of 726 of the most commonly traded stocks and searched for correlation with attendance data.

## Monday Wednesday Stock Correlations

I(pandas) went through each of the 720 stocks mentioned above and the stock with the highest correlation to the Monday/Wednesday class was Tesla with a correlation of 0.963. Here's a chart of both of their trendlines normalized so that each of their starting values is adjusted to 1.

![Tesla vs Monday/Wednesday Attendance](/images/stocks/TSLAvsMW.png)

Here's an STL Decomposition of the data for the Monday Wednesday Class. As you can see there's steady attendance then a drop then a slow downward trend.

![Monday/Wednesday Attendance Decomposition](/images/stocks/MWAttDecomp.png)

## Investment Takeaways

As far as I see it there are three main ways to view this: one is that the CMSC320 students in the Monday/Wednesday are TSLA options traders who go to class based on stock performance, the second that the price of the worlds most valuable car company heavily relies on class attendance and the third is that this was just random chance. Since I have faith that my fellow students are only motivated by their education the only real option is that the students are unwittingly more important to Tesla's stock price than Elon Musk.

## Tuesday Thursday Stock Correlations

Unlike the Monday/Wednesday class, the Tuesday/Thursday class had a negative correlation as its highest absolute value. In this case SSR Mining. Here's the trends compared.

![SSR Mining vs Tuesday/Thursday Attendance](/images/stocks/SSRMvsTH.png)

Here's the STL Decomposition for the Tuesday/Thursday class. As you can see, for this class the downward trend is more steady with most of the drop off happening earlier.

![Tuesday/Thursday Attendance Decomposition](/images/stocks/THDecomp.png)

## Adjusting for Trends

A common response to the above takeaways might be that these comparisons are dominated by overarching trends, which is fair. However, interestingly enough after applying a linear detrend to all data, the highest pearson correlation for the Monday/Wednesday class continues to be an electric car company. In this case, Lucid motors.

![Lucid Motors Correlation](/images/stocks/Lucid.png)

For the Tuesday/Thursday class the highest absolute value correlation after detrend is a negative correlation with ACADIA Pharmaceuticals Inc which is not as interesting.

## Methods

I got the stocks from [Nasdaq's stock screener](https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/screener) and then data from Yahoo's API. Stock/attendance correlations were calculated by creating date indexed dataframes on the dates where attendance data was available. Then I just used pandas .corr() method and took the highest.

![Stock Scraping Code](/images/stocks/stockScrape.png)

---

*For legal reasons this is not investment advice*

& Goliath

Writing

The Sabbath.

Conversation starters.

Planes!

In defense of Goliath.

Mechanized humans.

Cities.

Books, 2026.

CMSC320 students & the stock market.

Experience.