May 2005 Archives

So, I didn't get any money, but I took in some hardware at the Senior Awards Celebration. I received the University of Pennsylvania book award, a little thingy for doing ASE, and I think I'm going to receive (I left too early to tell because I was tired of sitting through the hundreds of CIM awards) somekind of thingy for being a National Merit Scholar Semifinalist (they haven't released this year's finalists, so I still may have hope!). Not bad. Some other people of interest are Ms. Meyerowitz--our new partner in leadership crime for next year--who got the award for her ASE internship and the Wellesley book award; and there was also the great Emily Priebe who received the Bryn Mawr book award, and a few other people I can't remember. You know it's really ironic that they call it a "book award" because U Penn didn't actually give me a book. But they will, according to the counseling office; apparently they want to get it autographed, and someone wants to have a conversation with me about my college plans.

I'm receiving some award tomorrow at the Senior Awards Ceremony. I'm not a senior. Odd. I hope it's money.

Money. Pecuniary matters. Pecus.

I've decided on what I should do with my life. I should invest my money and become ridculously wealthy while living a quiet life at a major research institution as a theoretical physicist, which will hopefully require me to do a lot of traveling on a university budget. It's really quite brilliant. There is strong empirical evidence that suggests that what everyone has been saying all along is true: money can buy happiness (a Dartmouth economist published a study concluding that, on average, $100,000 of additional income is worth the happiness of marriage--with none of the misery). This way, I won't actually have to do anything besides thinking, talking to people, and occasionally writing, and if I'm a failure in every respect of life and labor I still will have a bucketload of money to appease me. I'm not sure why more people don't think of life this way.

Wilson's One Act Festival closed today. Ivan Vassilevitch has officially finished for the year, and Natalia Stepanova and Stepan Stepanovitch have quietly drifted off into their own small corners of history. Overall, things went extraordinarily well for me and for everyone else. Considering that everything was cobbled together in a mere two weeks, it was all the more impressive.

I'm not out of the woods yet. Although half of my classes effectively end on Wednesday as the seniors leave, I still have to do a semester worth of C++, and few other things... like getting fat on indian and thai food. I think I lost about 7 pounds during APs, so I need to gain some back.

Mom and Erin returned from Paris the other day. Contrary to popular belief, the city is still standing and surprisingly hasn't yet been leveled by an errant protest or general strike.

My train of thought is seeming a bit vague and fractured right now, but I had this realization. No matter what my intentions are, I seem to always return in some way to Russia and its culture. This appears from the outset to be a quizzically random observation, but it's really true. Two years ago, it was the history of the Soviet economy. This year it was Russian foreign policy with Model UN. I even teleconferenced with Russian students and local officials in a Siberian city, and I crammed facts about Russian government and politics into my cerebrum for the Comparative examination. Now I'm performing obscure farces by Chekhov and reading Dostoevsky's The Idiot. It's inescapable. Russia is somewhat of a fundamental fascination for me. It is the one culture for which depression and irony are the core components of a "national persona": a recipe for perplexing, failed brilliance.

In the history of American politics, there is an interesting trend in the rise and fall of the dominance of each political party. Major power shifts are marked by critical elections in which the once dominant party loses badly due to a major ideological backlash by the electorate. The winning party then continues to aggregate power over 20 or 30 years or more, becoming increasingly radically ideological, until their own zealotry is their downfall in another critical election. Such was the life-cycle of the Democratic party from 1932 until the election of 1980.

Now the Republican party is clearly in charge, controlling the White House and both houses of Congress--an enviable achievement. Yet, they may be sowing the seeds of their own decline as we speak, in the same way that Congressional feeding of the federal bureaucracy's exponential obesity in the 1970s was one source of the Democratic party's subsequent losses. Proof of this lies in the ascent to power of the party's right wing, which has now come to characterize it's political center. The party was able to support and launch a war justified by false evidence, evidence that was in fact even obviously false or nonexistant at the time. Since then, they have justified this massive infraction on public trust by saying that Saddam Hussein was dangerous and therefore the war was still justifiable. This is irrelevant damage control. Whether Saddam Hussein was a threat or not is about the furthest one can get from the real issue at hand. Kim Jong Il and the institution that is OPEC are bigger threats to our nation than Saddam Hussein was. Simply being a threat is not a justification for war. The issue is whether the intelligence community and the administration used evidence in their justification that was intentionally falsified or blown out of proportion. While I obviously can't make an inquiry fit to answer this question fully, I can say that I personally never heard true definitive evidence that Saddam Hussein was threatening. I heard about a few mobile trailers and I heard vague unsubstantiated rhetoric about "massive stockpiles of weapons". Furthermore, I would like to make one additional observation. Since there have been absolutely no traces of dangerous stockpiles of weapons (other than some old, empty warheads, with possible traces of chemical weapons sitting in the middle of nowhere), it seems very peculiar that there ever could have been such prolific evidence to justify a war. It's very strange indeed that we could honestly happen upon so much evidence of something that doesn't actually exist, and equally odd that none of this evidence has been released to the public. Just a thought.

While there are numerous examples of it, the issue of John Bolton provides another scrap of evidence that the zealotry of the Republicans' right flank is driving the party out of control. It is a fact that many strong conservatives greatly dislike the UN. Certainly, the institution is in need of reform and restructuring, and any true observer of the UN has seen the massive changes that Kofi Annan has made during his tenure and continues to make. So the administration decided to appoint John Bolton, a very right-wing conservative, to the post of UN ambassador. Bolton stated, [M]any Republicans in Congress--and perhaps a majority--not only do not care about losing the General Assembly vote but actually see it as a 'make my day' outcome. Indeed, once the vote is lost… this will simply provide further evidence to may why nothing more should be paid to the UN system." His prolific speaking and writing provide much more evidence of this nonchalont attitude toward the existance of the UN. In addition, there are numerous criticisms about his personal integrity and treatment of subordinants. Not only does he represent the most idiotic choice for a UN ambassador, but he is a stupid nominee for any kind of diplomatic office. It is an incredibly bad idea to appoint someone with such a disagreeable attitude toward the UN to the ambassadorship at a time when we are trying to encourage reform and to repair our terrible reputation in the institution. The appointee needs to be someone of strong personality who is also agreeable and good at working with other people to move in a common direction. Furthermore, Bolton is hardly fitting for being a diplomat at all. The second definition of diplomat that many dictionaries list after "an ambassador" is "One who uses skill and tact in dealing with others." We have seen nothing but the very antithesis of that phrase in this individual.

But this is precisely the point that I am making. The Republican right-wing has hijacked the party and flown it so far from center that they are doing things like inventing their own reality with regards to logic, evidence, and the word "diplomat." In this new world of reinvention, logic is something that is invented by the user, and a diplomat is someone who tells them what he's going to do and then does what he told them he'd do. No wonder the right-wing AM talk show hosts accuse schools of being instruments of liberal political socialization. Those godless institutions espouse radical values outside the American mainstream like criticism, analysis, discourse, and worst of all, thinking. They weren't lying when they named them the "liberal arts."

AP exams are OVER!!!! I finished up with a bang on both econ tests. I had a little trouble on the micro multiple choice, but I obliterated the macro multiple choice and both free-reponse sections. After a grand cumulative total of 18 hours and 25 minutes of combined testing for the year, I am done!! And so here are my humble predictions for my scores (I have habit of being quite accurate in such matters... I usually just underestimate a tad):

Calculus BC: 5
Physics C Mechanics: 3
Physics C E&M: 4
Environmental Science: 4
US Government and Politics: 5
Comparative Government and Politics: 4
Macroeconomics: 5
Microeconomics: 4

Share your own predictions for your AP exams.

I'm three-sevenths of the way done with this year's round of AP tests. After a reasonable showing on Calc BC and misery on Physics C, I redeemed myself by doing better than expected on the Environmental Science exam. The multiple choice was almost entirely fact-recall, with remarkably little analysis. Although there were some facts with which I was unfamiliar, I was very confident on about 60% of the questions, somewhat confident on about 32% of the questions, and I skipped 8 questions. Making a number of statistical assumptions, it would be reasonable to suppose that I could easily pull off getting around 70 (raw score) on the multiple choice. Aside from a the first question, which dealt with an area in which I'm not too familiar, I obliterated the free-response with ease. This puts me on track for a solid 4--surprising, considering that I hardly studied and that Zaraza doesn't really teach explicitly for the AP. I'm calm yet psyched for two days of double whammies in US and Comparative Government and Micro- and Macroeconomics. And so with that I depart to read about Mexican politics.

So. The AP Physics test was today. In my infinitely asinine, hubris-laced foolishness, I elected to take the calculus-based C exam instead of the algebra-based B exam which my class covered. I was feeling quite confident as of 11:59 today. I had scored about 80%-90% on the free-response questions from tests over the past 3 years on both mechanics and E&M. At high noon today, my body was struck by a vertically oscillating blade of position y(t)=cos([10^56]t) (take note that that is faster than the speed of light), which began to move at t=0 when my body was halfway under the blade already. Although I am legally bound not to discuss any of the test questions here, I will say that it tends to be very difficult not to perform royal face-plants on tests when the examinations don't actually cover the most important and significant topics in the syllabus, but instead test minute, paltrey and unimportant ones. That is all I shall say. I must go moan and flagellate myself some more.

I've been preparing for the physics C AP test partially by taking old free-response tests under simulated conditions. I've taken about 3 from the period 1999 to 2003, and I was saving the 2004 exams to take just before the real test to get the most accurate picture of my knowledge and where I need to add to it most. So, considering that the test is nearly upon me, I thought it a wise idea to take that test this evening. On the previous free-response sections I've been getting between 42 and 45 out of 45 points--outstanding results that gave me confidence. So I casually printed out the 2004 test, started the timer and breezed through the first question--an application of Gauss's Law to an infinite cylinder surrounding a line of charge--earning a full 15 points. So I moved on to the second question, involving a fairly simple RC circuit. The question was slightly odd though, giving the resistance of only one of the resistors, and asking for the voltage across the other before the branch containing the capacitor was connected. I was nervously stumped for about four minutes but then figured it out, earning an acceptable 14 out of 15 points, and finishing just as two-thirds of my time had elapsed.

And then there was the third question, a lovely example of electromagnetic induction, something that I'm usually quite good at. The problem involved an infinite wire of current I, next to which sat a rectangular loop of wire of given dimensions. The first part was rather long, asking to calculate the magnetic flux through the wire. Talk about a pain. This involved an integration of the magnetic field from Faraday's law over the dimension of the loop parallel to the wire. After an easy conceptual question, the next part asked for the current in the loop if the current in the wire was decreasing exponentially according to a given equation. By this time, even if I hadn't already made a mistake, the stupid accumulation of constants would have actually made it impossible to complete the problem on time correctly because each time I wanted to write a new line, I had to carefully keep track of about nine constants that were floating around. And finally, my personal favorite, finding the total energy dissipated by the loop, which involved integrating the expression for power dissipated from 0 to infinity, using the stupid expression with nine constants. So by the time I had finished botching this beast, I had written down about 55 constants. And since I had to write these stupid things down so many times, I gradually accumulated so many errors since I was so strapped for time, that my final answer didn't really resemble the correct answer at all by the time I arrived at the end of part d. My score? A paltrey 8 out of 15--this on a test in which you can usually get nearly half credit by simply writing down equations without evaluating anything. My final score? A lousy 38. Or at least I thought this was lousy until I looked up the average scores. On question 1: 6.34/15; question 2: 5.47/15; question 3: 3.78/15, for a grand total of 15.59/45. This test is an exercise in damage control.

ASWS is a rare and fortunately temporary disease, occurring when the patient is subjected to large quantities of stress and work, and rapidly weaned off the high stress cycle into a new cycle of significantly reduced tension. The result is that the patient quickly loses all motivation to work or perform any tasks assigned to him/her. I am its victim. I just finished my junior literary analysis paper (the infamous JLAP), and I will take the BC Calculus AP tomorrow. Over the past several weeks, I have been cobbling together my paper, frantically finishing 1200 pages of books for it, studying for seven AP tests this week and next, working on a 30-page study of a local stream for ecology, and involved various other high-impact cerebral strains. As it all comes to a close within the next two weeks, and the sun finally shines on a semi-regular basis, I cannot help but sit in a contemplative stupor doing absolutely nothing but fathoming the infinite and eternal verities of life and the unknown. Nothing. Which is precisely why I'm writing this, here, now. I think I'll go read some of Walden.