January 2005 Archives

Today was the first time that Wilson had participated in the Regional Science Bowl competition. After a relatively small amount of practicing, we had our members divided up into two teams: Wilson A: (grades 11 and 12--actually only grade 11 since there were no seniors on the team) Colin Corbett, Ted Sanders, James Lessert, and I (Jonathan Kadish was the alternate, but chose not to compete because he wanted to go to this weekend's speech tournament instead); and Wilson B: (grades 9 and 10) Ari Allan-Feuer, Carlin Kersch, Mark Wasserman, Elliot Firestone, and Erik Werstler. At the regional science bowl, 64 teams were participating in quiz-bowl competitions for two top spots to go to the national science bowl competition in Washington DC. The style of the competition was relatively straightforward. Questions (some of which are multiple choice) are read aloud by a moderator, and contestants buzz in to answer. "Toss Up" questions can be answered by anyone and are worth 4 points. When a team answers a toss up question correctly, they get a bonus question which only they can answer. The bonus questions are usually more difficult than the toss up questions and are worth 10 points. The only significant penalties are for saying your answer before you are recognized, and for answering incorrectly if you have buzzed in before the moderator has finished reading the question. In these cases, four points are added to the score of the opposing team.

When we arrived for the competition at the University of Portland, it turns out that the A team had gotten a fairly difficult schedule, while the B team was slated to compete against much easier teams for the first four rounds. We were put against three magnet schools and Riverdale, quite possibly the wealthiest public school in the entire state (ironically Riverdale is in my backyard, but I can't go there without paying about $10,000. Real estate prices in Riverdale are too high for it to be practical to build a school within the district limits.). To compound our problems, no one on the A team had any experience in prior science bowl competitions, while everyone except Ari on the B team did. Accordingly, our performance was mediocre. We lost our first round 58-62, after being ahead for most of the round. We got demolished in our second round (roughly 20-70), largely because of poor teamwork and avoidable penalties. Finally we found our rhythm in the third round, winning roughly 90-60 (against Riverdale, incidentally), and in the fourth we dominated 112-22. A 2-2 record wasn't enough to get us into the final elimination bracket for the afternoon. We finished a lackluster 4th out of 8 in our division.

The B team from Wilson, on the other hand, had somewhat better fortune--to immensely understate it. Their division was very odd because out of the 8 teams, 4 went 4-0, and the other 4 went 0-4. Thankfully, they were one of the 4-0 teams, and they had won by large enough margins to move into the elimination bracket. The team records in that division clearly indicated that they had played some terrible teams, and the strength of their cerebral-motive forces was about to be tested. In the first round of elimination they crushed the the West Linn A team by nearly 100 points. The next round, they had a close and bitter loss to the South Eugene A team, dropping them into the losers' bracket. For perhaps four more rounds they battled their way through the losers bracket in a combination of extremely close wins and landslides, with Ari leading the way (in one match he single-handedly won nearly 100 points). Eventually they faced South Eugene again, obliterating them by nearly 100 points. Next, they felled Westview A team by about 40 points, despite a minor and cheap protest by Westview which they tried to blow way out of proportion. The protest only would have won them 10 points. This brought them to the final match for 1st and 2nd place against the Skyview A team. By this point they were guaranteed a trip to nationals in Washington DC. Because Skyview was undefeated throughout the tournament and our B team had lost once, we would have had to beat them twice in order to win. With about 4 seconds left, we were down 68-70, but had a bonus question that could have won the round. Under the pressure the contestants couldn't find the answer, even as they racked their brains. Eventually Ari was forced to respond "supernovae" instead of "red giants." But what can I say? After completely and totally outperforming us, earning an all-expense-paid trip to Washington DC for nationals, and receiving thousands of dollars in scholarship money, the B team is certainly quite impressive.

The PIL science bowl competition is coming up soon, and we're hoping that different rules for teams sizes will allow the A team to inherit Ari (the primary scorer for the B team) and successfully obliterate the rest of Portland. There's a team limit of seven for the PIL tournament and Colin can't make it, so the A and B teams could theoreticallybe consolidated into one super-team.

News Flash!!: I just talked to Jonathan Kadish, and the speech and debate team apparently delivered some severe damage at today's tournament. He said that it looked like he and Ian won the final debate round. The future of science bowl and speech and debate looks bright indeed.

Finals are this week and someone (cough, cough, the new curriculum vice-principal, cough, cough...) came up with the brilliant idea that finals, previously held over three half days each of two 75-minute periods, could be condensed into two normal block days with three 95-minute periods in each. Furthermore, it would also increase efficiency if these two finals days were put after three full, normal days of school, instead of being put in the usual, shorter, four-day week. So basically, this week has amounted to be one of the absolute worst of my existance. Let's first consider today's events:

6:00 AM - Wake up
7:00-9:50 AM - Go in before school to get started on the 16 problem essay test for physics. In the 20 years that Zaraza has been giving this test, the highest score ever was about 140/160. Thankfully, he curves it, and it is only worth 10% of our grade. Considering that I have about 98% in the class, it doesn't really matter. On the test, all of the problems are entirely conceptual, and points are actually deducted for using equations in the response. While I was extremely skeptical of the merits of this plan earlier, I can understand his philosophy now. Everything else we do in the class is entirely math-based, and it tends to be the case that people become so engrossed in their equations and math that they forget what things actually physically represent. A conceptual test is a good way to test whether people actually understand the physics that they apply mathematically. Surprisingly it ended up being a little bit easier than I expected. I'm pretty sure I got most of them right, except for one bizarre question that read: "Describe in detail how to remove dust from a jacket by shaking it." I had no idea what the question was trying to get at; so, with considerable arrogance, I made up a ridiculous scheme whereby a large Van de Graaff generator and massive electric field are used to eliminate the problematic dust. Despite being doable and relatively inconsequential, the test was very long--nearly 3 hours during which I typed three and half single-spaced pages.

9:50-10:04 AM - Break. Talk with Jon and Leeor about physics test.

10:04-11:39 AM - Take the 2nd half of the Spanish final: 130 multiple choice questions. On the composition section of the test, which I took two weeks ago, I learned that I got 98%. The multiple choice was extremely long and extremely easy. There's not much more to say. I talked to Sra. Flores after school, and she said that I missed 1 out of 100 on the grammar section, and 4 out of 30 on the culture/literature section (contained questions on all of the stories that we read months ago and that I forgot to review).

11:39 AM-12:19 PM - Lunch. I ran to the Hillsdale Library to drop of some books and pick up The Age of Reason by J.P. Sartre. Then I ran to the school library to swap my government book for the economics book (finally I get to start econ next semester!). Eat some bread in a few idle minutes.

12:19-2:10 PM - Take the calculus final. Culpepper decided to make it all multiple choice with no calculator allowed. I was actually glad that calculators weren't allowed because it meant that there weren't any weird numerical questions. It was interesting because it was very much in the style of the AP test (except for the fact that it was harder and there realistically wasn't a time limit) in the sense that there were very few brute-force differentiation or integration problems, but a lot of the questions were pretty difficult. I talked about the answers with Culpepper afterward, and while she didn't grade my test, I'm almost positive that I got 100%.

2:10-3:30 PM - Go to Thai Corner (now called Krua Thai) to eat... delicious.

3:30-4:15 PM - Speech practice... sort of.

4:15-6:00 PM - Go to Jon's house to study for ecology exam tomorrow. Our consciounesses (probably not a word) eventually just evaporated and our studies decayed into a state of semi-conscious, vegetative stupor.

I have no idea why I wrote this entry. The worst mistake of my life. I'm going to go take a bath. It's interesting how the entire body begins to ache with exhaustion after a lot of mental exertion.

Well, it turns out Boly didn't exactly like the rough draft of my satire of President Bush's Inaugural (or at least that was the sense I got after he referred to it as a "problem," and asked me if anyone who had read it had laughed). Realistically speaking, he's completely right, although I and a few other people actually DID find it to be at least mildly humorous. And I agree that it does indeed lack a true, singular "target" of satire (instead it has about seven that are loosely cobbled together). With that said, I'm in a bit of a bind. I've concluded that a proper and technically "good" satire of the Inaugural speech is either impossible or far beyond my abilities. This is mainly because it would be nearly inconceivable to satirize only one single target in such a broad speech. The only real chance of doing so would be to attack Bush's neologisms, personality, or speaking style, none of which really makes for a substantial piece. Trying to satirize policy at the same time as Bush quickly gets complicated and confusing. Compounding these problems is the vague language used in the actual speech itself, which doesn't explicitly reference any direct policy anyway. So what does that leave me with? Well, it left me with absolutely nothing. Not wanting to deviate too drastically from the rough draft that I already turned in, I finally came up with the idea that I should do a satirical essay on the Bush energy policy. So far it's pretty bad, although a perhaps a little more clear than the last one. I think I'm just going to have to come to grips with the fact that I'm not funny at all, in addition to being absolutely terrible at literary analysis. But at least you can fake your way through the literary analysis in high school and still get an A or A- on the papers; I'm not so sure about the humor. Considering that the two criteria are 1) ability to discern a clear target of satire, 2) ability to make the reader laugh, I quiver to think what this piece is going to receive, even under Boly's normally benevolent grading scale.

I took the SAT this morning at Cleveland. It's the absolute last time that the test is offerred before it changes significantly. My only real gripe was that it was painfully long. Things went pretty well: I was positive about all of my answers on the math and most on the reading. Knowing how things go, I'll probably have made a couple of stupid mistakes. Given my experience from taking practice SATs, I probably missed two on the math from total stupidity, dropping my score down to 750 (generally, missing two on the math does this, although if the math is curved at all, which it occasionally is, then this would probably be a 760 or 770). On the verbal, I probably got somewhere between 700 and 720, allowing for one or two wrong answers in each of the analogy sections. I must say, however, that I felt particularly good about the sentence completion and analogies. I'm pretty sure that I missed one or two, but I knew virtually all of the words. In the practice tests I had done slightly worse. That combines to somewhere between 1450 and 1470--not great, but adequate for a first run.

Afterward, Jon, his friend Laura Tolle, and I went to Thai Spoon for lunch. It's quite good, although there are some places that are slightly better.

What I find particularly amusing is the fact that you happened to stumble randomly across my blog, of the sick multitude of blogs on the web...

Vice President Cheney, Mr. Chief Justice, Former President Bush, reverend clergy, distinguished guests, fellow citizens, President Clint—:

Today, I am most honored to have the privilege of taking this great oath, and of being the chosen one to carry out the durable wisdom of our emanent Constitution.

Our duty for these next four years is not defined by the words I use or misuse, but rather by the recent events which have redefined the very consciousness of our God-fearing nation's role on this globe. On that great day, just over three years ago, like an evil, freedom-hating demon, terrorists assaulted us. Since that day, we have both understood and misunderstood, but in particular, we have understood that the shape of our future in this world must change. We have understood that we must be the agent of freedom around the world, and that we must let no regime of tyranny stand untouched by the inherently superior glory of democracy.

And by no means can this goal be achieved alone. We must work with our glorious fellow allies in democracy and liberty, such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Russia, and Poland, who have valiantly stood by our sides in our crusade to free the world. In order for this grand vision to advance, no country that refuses to join the arsenal of freedom should be spared our scrutiny. Even those nations—once our allies—that have wavered and even criticized our missions of freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan should not be spared from our vigilant glance; for, it is inconceivable that any true ally of the free would refuse the opportunity to serve in its grand army.

In carrying out its monumental plans, America must never lose its stout determination, and its will to take action when required. History shows that there is no substitute for action, not even diplomacy. How many times have we witnessed the success of force, when diplomacy has failed? When dealing with the irrational and disturbed minds of deranged, rouge leaders who are willing to stockpile arms and use reckless military aggression without regard to international laws, regulations, or wishes of the international community, force is the only language understood. Some in the world would use methods of negotiation with such tyrants, but it is foolish to give them the benefit of the doubt when this only propagates their reign of oppression. Instead we must liberate them! With bombs and guns the coalition of the willing—that is to say, the coalition of the free—which is to say, the coalition of the freedom-loving nations of this world have a moral duty to forcefully liberate the oppressed, and establish our own free governments in place of their own, which we have deemed inadequate. With the “compassionated” support of the free world, the regions of darkness will fall under the curtain of light and freedom.

May God bless us all, may He watch over His promised land, the United States of America, and may we sustain “our national life by the truths of Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, the words of the Koran, and the varied faiths of our people.”

Leadership
AP English 7-8
AP Chemistry
AP Biology
AP Computer Science 7-8 (Java)
Spanish 7-8
Multivariable Calc (1st semester)
Differential equations (2nd semester)

In other scholastic news, I'm taking the SATs this Saturday--the last time that they will be offered before the introduction of the new test with the essay component. Colin Corbett has already gotten 1600 (as has Robin Bjorkquist, I believe), so there unfortunately are no bragging rights to be gained amongst my friends. My fairly attainable goal is to get at least 1500. I'll need to get at least 1550 to get any kind of respect from those lazy and imperious nerds in my calculus class, though.

... perhaps like what he imagined would be produce if the right hemisphere of a child's brain mysteriously vanished into unworldly vaccuum, while his body remained, still living in technical terms, like a sick caricature of ghastly human parody, but dead in every conceivable way. He shuddered at this grim prospect and retrieved his novel.

I think the right hemisphere of my brain died. Truly terrible. I'm convinced that doing too much math and physics rots the other half of the brain. Not only do math and physics exercise numerical analytic capabilites of the left hemisphere, but they constrain one's pattern of thought to certain parameters. The restriction introduced by each one of these parameters is, in fact, a tiny message instructing the brain to constrain itself and thus not exercise creativity. Since the right hemisphere controls creativity, you can see that math and science (particularly physics) have an effect on this part of the brain that is akin to the impact that a runner's consumption of five pounds of lard everyday would have on his/her physical performance. And all of this hogwash about physics requiring "creative" thinking is hogwash. Collectively, physicists are generally regarded as being the social group that is most hostile to new ideas (with the possible exception of the KKK).

Additionally, I've encountered this terrible manifestation of an inferiority complex, whereby I feel increasingly ignorant, stupid, and unempowered with infinitestimally small chunk of knowledge, dk, that I learn. If you think about it, this is the worst possible scenario. The feeling of inferiority drives one to do more to attempt to rectify it by investing more time and effort in school and learning. However, doing so only results in an even greater feeling of inferiority, thus exacerbating the effect.

I've reinstalled my blog yet again because some stuff wasn't working. Much of the stuff is working again, but a few things are still broken.

In recent news, this weekend has been negatively terrible: let me start from the beginning. I stayed at school all day until about 9 PM friday to play with Pep Band. The three hours between the end of school and call-time were less than riviting, but I got a fair amount of calculus homework completed. We played at the women's basketball game against Lincoln, in which Wilson lost fairly decisively. I have, however, decided that these Pep Band events are perfect for doing homework. I can crank out some integrals while taking relaxing breaks to play or occasionally watch the game. Anyway, Jonathan Kadish found me and coerced me into going to karaoke with him, Leeor, Irene, Liz, Pat (Irene's exchange student from Thailand), and Jorge (Leeor's exchange student from Costa Rica), after the conclusion of the game. Ian Rocker was supposed to come, but decided to conveniently avoid all modes of communication by which we attempted to contact him.

If the matter ever comes up again, remind me never to do karaoke. We had to drive all the way out to some remote suburb to get to this odd-smelling, Korean karaoke establishment, which--I must add--was in the basement of a building, accesible only through a hard-to-find entrance. The 25 degree F temperature rendered the situation lugubriously frigid. To top it all off, I had to pay $6 for this wasted time. Considering that the size of the Korean music selection dwarfed that of the English by a ratio of about 5:1, I was somewhat disappointed. Actually no, "disappointed" is entirely the wrong term. Perhaps I should say that my cynicism caused by singing bad pop music was only enlarged.

After that, we were going to go home, but Irene's exchange student Pat wanted to go to Voodoo Doughnuts (conveniently open from 10 PM to 10 AM), which happens to be located downtown. So we drove all the way back from this environ to Burnside. We had been driving in two cars since two groups of people had converged on the karaoke parlor, but we stopped at Jon's house along the way to consolidate into a single vehicle. Since Jon and I were planning to get together to do calculus and go to see "21 in Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com" at Portland Center Stage the following day (this Saturday), I just left my backpack and trumpet in his car at his house. Finally, we found parking and made it to this Voodoo Doughnuts place. I must say that it is a rather interesting business for both its model of operation and its physical character.

When we arrived, the place was packed such that there was standing room only. The fact that it is one of the only gastronomical establishments operating at that hour and allowing minors means that they undoubted do a bang-up business. The physical character is what one would expect from the name: rather odd and small with very strange and creative doughnuts. Although my consumption doughnuts usually induces severe stomach cramping, I did manage to successfully eat a small one without discomfort. While Jon was playing their organ, we watched as Pat, the exchange student from Thailand, ate one and a half massive doughnuts: it was one of the most disgusting things I've seen in a long time. Apparently doughnuts do not exist in Thailand. Upon leaving, we stopped a grocery store to pick up some rice for a meal that Jorge was cooking for Leeor, and then went home.

This doesn't sound so bad yet, but then again, this account only takes us up to about 1 AM Saturday. When I woke up Saturday morning, a solid sheet of ice had frozen over everything, and freezing rain was still coming down. At it's thickest, the ice sheet was about 5 mm. So, it goes without saying that I was completely trapped in my house. I nearly killed myself going out to get the newspaper. This wouldn't have been so bad, had all of my stuff not been trapped at Jon's house, about a mile away. Driving was definitely out of the question, as was walking, so I was left without a trumpet and without any schoolwork. We had to reschedule our tickets for the play, which wouldn't have been so bad had I not needed to go to some kind of literary event for an assignment for school. After significant searching, I finally was able to get tickets for a series for four playlets tonight (one of which, was incidentally written by someone I know from school), hoping that the ice would thaw by then. But basically, I spent all of Saturday trapped inside with nothing to do, not even reading, since my book was in my backpack.

Today, finally, the ice started to thaw, and I was able to get my stuff back, and go to the series of four playlets called "The Cold Comedy Concoction" (Highly recommended, $10 for students, Stark Raving Theatre in NW). I still have to do a ton of work (ten more integrals, a short paper, a bunch of reading, some Spanish, and some physics), but at least I now have my stuff and a free day tomorrow because of Martin Luther King Day. Sigh...

In response to two people's comments about my JLAP author, I'm choosing Baldwin. And for the record, like all of the left-hemispheric, linear-thinking people that read this blog, I too, as a general rule, don't like poetry. Agee actually wrote two fiction works, three non-fiction works, and only one collection of poems. In addition to that, he was a journalist. He's a pretty amazingly brilliant writer too. A Death in the Family, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, is a gorgeous book. I like Thoreau, but it's very dense, and I want to read works of fiction for my paper, so that I can do a more proper literary analysis. So that leaves Baldwin, with his interesting mix of vitrolic social commentary and exploration of people and their interactions (or so it seems from what I've read).

The largest news of late is the speech and debate tournament at Pacific University tomorrow and Saturday. I should be gone for a cumulative 28 hours over two days. Anyway, I've got a bad feeling about it. I did extremely well at the past tournament, but I'm nervous about this one, especially considering that practice today was so-so. The topic was absolutely terrible for various reasons, and we made a number of serious missteps. The only reason why we probably won was because our opponents did not exploit our errors. Furthermore, I feel badly about missing yet another day of school. I just missed 3 days last week because of my surgery, one day for another speech tournament, and two days for Thanksgiving. It's an incredible pain to miss school and have to make it up, and I think that some of my teachers are getting annoyed with my recurrent absence.

The end of the semester is approaching, so I have a truly obnoxious amount of work to do. My personal favorites are: a worksheet of 50 integrals, many of which cannot be solved using Maple or TI-89 calculators, and final in physics consisting of 16 conceptual essay questions in which no math is allowed (this makes absolutely no sense...). Out of a 160 possible points on the physics final, the highest score ever was something like 145. I think he said that the average was around 100. This is why grade curvature was invented. Anyway, I'd better stop wasting my time and start doing some of this junk.

The weather looks promising: 40-60 mph winds for the next two days, followed by a predicted 6 days of snow. Prepare for the DEEP FREEZE! The ground didn't even thaw today. Yes!!