June 2005 Archives

I had a revelation today. Astronomy is kind of like statistics. It's number crunching and arithmetic. Physics and math on the contrary is kind of like art.

Considering that I'm at a nerd camp, it goes without saying that the collective grammatical capabilities of everyone here--staff included--is not particularly impressive. They might be able to do integrals just a hair slower than Mathematica, but they aren't always grammatically correct. One particularly annoying misstep that I've heard from numerous people of all genders and ages is the use of an adjective in place of an adverb. Mistaking "good" for "well" is understandable, considering how deep this error has percolated into the diction of society. But "perfect" instead of "perfectly"? "Quick" instead of "quickly"? That goes a little far, and there are more too. I'm predicting the decline of the "-ly" suffix in the future of the English language. Considering how much inflexion the language has lost ever since it split from proto-Germanic, this transformation would not be surprising.

We have Sundays off, so one of the events that occurs is a trip to town to the grocery store to buy needed things. Socorro, New Mexico reminds me a lot of a slightly more upscale Winnemucca (sp?), Nevada, or any one of those other completely nonunique, semi-urban strips that dot that state. In other words, there's not a lot of anything to do "in town". We had been planning on going to Smith's, a grocery store, to shop, but as it turns out, there is a Walmart that just opened in the town, and everyone wanted to go there instead. So, after some grumbling the TAs consented to take us there, rather than to Smith's. I've only been to a Walmart once or twice before in my life, and it was a particular store in Utah that happened to only sell food; my past Walmart experience really couldn't come close to capturing the full essence of the store. Walmarts don't actually exist within the city limits of Portland, or even within a couple miles outside of the city because they always get shot down by a combination of high land prices, little flat, open land, and massive opposition by citizens and neighborhood associations. Given their notorious business practices, I was admittedly a bit disappointed to being spending my money there, but after seeing inthe same tater tots recycled in the dining hall through two breakfasts, lunch, and dinner, both "raw" and in a very sketchy casserole, I couldn't pass up the chance of obtaining something that actually looked like it came from a plant. It reminded me all too much of that classic scene in "Napoleon Dynamite".

Upon seeing the store, my first impression was an overwhelming sense of disgust. It was an architectural eyesore, essentially a giant, grey, brick box with a big, blue pentagon for a facade. Talk about hideous. When I entered, I gravitated toward the produce, and was not particularly impressed by the selection or prices. I did find some excellent peaches for $0.88/pound, and I bought a bunch. Yet the other food wasn't any cheaper than what one would pay at my normal grocery store in Portland. In addition to the peaches, I bought some apples, dried apricots, a small bar of the only decent-looking bar of dark chocolate in the entire store, some wheat crackers, and a mechanical pencil. In total I paid about $14. Unimpressed by the average prices and relative lack of selection, I met up with everyone else. There's nothing to make you realize how much of a hippie you are like going to Walmart with a bunch of teenagers from a random sample of places throughout the US. The other students had purchased a wide variety of candy and soda pop (ironically also available in the dining hall...), and one student bought a Foreman grill and over a kilogram of beef. Even the Italian student was so amazed by Walmart that he spent $50 on soda and junk food so that he could take pictures of it an send it to his friends in Italy. It turns out that you can buy 48 cans of soda for $10 at Walmart (roughly 20.83 cents per can). Apparently the strategy behind Walmart is that they have low prices for every type of crappy, homogenous, boring, and unhealthy food, and then jack up the prices and have a terrible selection for all the good food. What a worthless store...

Speaking of me realizing how much of a hippie I am, I was looking in the recycling bin in the dorms the other day, and I discovered that it was filled solely with things that I had put in it. Apparently no one from anywhere else in the country recycles...

We have Sundays off, so one of the events that occurs is a trip to town to the grocery store to buy needed things. Socorro, New Mexico reminds me a lot of a slightly more upscale Winnemucca (sp?), Nevada, or any one of those other completely nonunique, semi-urban strips that dot that state. In other words, there's not a lot of anything to do "in town". We had been planning on going to Smith's, a grocery store, to shop, but as it turns out, there is a Walmart that just opened in the town, and everyone wanted to go there instead. So, after some grumbling the TAs consented to take us there, rather than to Smith's. I've only been to a Walmart once or twice before in my life, and it was a particular store in Utah that happened to only sell food; my past Walmart experience really couldn't come close to capturing the full essence of the store. Walmarts don't actually exist within the city limits of Portland, or even within a couple miles outside of the city because they always get shot down by a combination of high land prices, little flat, open land, and massive opposition by citizens and neighborhood associations. Given their notorious business practices, I was admittedly a bit disappointed to being spending my money there, but after seeing inthe same tater tots recycled in the dining hall through two breakfasts, lunch, and dinner, both "raw" and in a very sketchy casserole, I couldn't pass up the chance of obtaining something that actually looked like it came from a plant. It reminded me all too much of that classic scene in "Napoleon Dynamite".

>Upon seeing the store, my first impression was an overwhelming sense of disgust. It was an architectural eyesore, essentially a giant, grey, brick box with a big, blue pentagon for a facade. Talk about hideous. When I entered, I gravitated toward the produce, and was not particularly impressed by the selection or prices. I did find some excellent peaches for $0.88/pound, and I bought a bunch. Yet the other food wasn't any cheaper than what one would pay at my normal grocery store in Portland. In addition to the peaches, I bought some apples, dried apricots, a small bar of the only decent-looking bar of dark chocolate in the entire store, some wheat crackers, and a mechanical pencil. In total I paid about $14. Unimpressed by the average prices and relative lack of selection, I met up with everyone else. There's nothing to make you realize how much of a hippie you are like going to Walmart with a bunch of teenagers from a random sample of places throughout the US. The other students had purchased a wide variety of candy and soda pop (ironically also available in the dining hall...), and one student bought a Foreman grill and over a kilogram of beef. Even the Italian student was so amazed by Walmart that he spent $50 on soda and junk food so that he could take pictures of it an send it to his friends in Italy. It turns out that you can buy 48 cans of soda for $10 at Walmart (roughly 20.83 cents per can). Apparently the strategy behind Walmart is that they have low prices for every type of crappy, homogenous, boring, and unhealthy food, and then jack up the prices and have a terrible selection for all the good food. What a worthless store...

Speaking of me realizing how much of a hippie I am, I was looking in the recycling bin in the dorms the other day, and I discovered that it was filled solely with things that I had put in it. Apparently no one from anywhere else in the country recycles...

Warning: not proofread.

I was milling over the fact that I have written very little of substance in this blog over the past 9 months. Readership has dwindled, and I've felt very uncreative and not thoughtful at all. How unfortunate indeed! Anyway, I've decided that since I have fairly consistent and complete access to a computer here, I'm going to write down my observations with some more regularity and insight than I have been doing recently. It has occurred to me that I am witnessing a very interesting social situation in my stay in New Mexico. Namely, I am witnessing the formation of a complete "social order" of sorts. Typically, when looking at any group of people, one observes that people have differentiated themselves into semi-independent groups. It is the natural course of things. But rarely is one given the chance to observe the formation of these groups. One might suppose that a group of nerds would be less discriminating and less apt to allow these divisions to form than the population as a whole. This indisputably true. The people here are quite intelligent and the social divisions that are formed are not entirely exclusive or concrete, but they still exist. It seems to be an indisputable fact of human nature to form groups of accquaintance that act to somehow exclude other people. Even I find myself drawn in with a particular semi-exclusive group.

Another observation that fascinates me is the demographics of the people here. We see the predictably large proportion of Asians (about 35% or so) and a few foreigners from Korea, Russia, and Italy. More interesting though is the distribution of people from public and private schools. At least half of the people are from private schools, many of them from those obnoxious east-coast boarding schools like Andover, Saint Andrews, etc. It's odd because there is a definite stigma against the public schools, some people seeming to doubt that anything of academic merit could come from a normal public school. I had a particularly interesting conversation at lunch this morning. As it turns out, I've always thought that I was really bad at chess because I inevitably lose to nearly all of my friends at school. Here, I'm probably the second or third best player. I guess my distortion comes from the fact that our school has an outstanding chess team and most of my friends who play chess are on it. So, whenever I play with my friends, I always get slaughtered. We were talking about chess, so I was explaining this situation to someone, and when he heard that my friends were quite good at chess, he immediately said, "I take it you go to a private school?" I replied "no," so he continued, "Oh, so you go to a magnet school then?" When I replied "no" to that, there seemed to be this odd period of misunderstanding in which the notion of my enrollment in a public school was as confounding as n-dimensional geometry to this person. It was quite awkward, but I think it epitomized the impression of the American public education system by many people. To a large degree, it is an accurate picture, but not entirely accurate. It's very interesting because the people here aren't really any "smarter" than most of my friends. The failure of public education comes in fully converting this intellectual potential into actual accomplishment, especially for the top bracket of students. There is no question that many of the people here, even those that are not particularly insightful, are quite accomplished. Most of them attend private schools. It's quite remarkable.

Anyway, I have one last thing to discuss before I finish. We were at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History yesterday afternoon, and I saw this huge old metal sign with two big metal bars positioned in an x between the corners of the square. Later that night I was waiting for my time slot at the observatory. It was around midnight and I didn't have much to do, so I fashioned this nifty geometric proof. Consider a regular n-sided polygon. Draw line segments from the center to each of the vertices. Now, each of the interior angles of the polygon will have a measure of x = (180*(n-2))/n. The angle between each of the segments will be y = 360/n. If you translate each of the line segments to the other end of the adjacent segment, the interior angle formed will be y = 180-(360/n). Rearraging a little gives y = (180*(n-2))/n, which is exactly the same as angle x. So x = y. Since all of the line segments are of equal magnitude, translating the interior line segments in the fashion just described will produce a regular n-sided polygon similar to the original. Utterly useless, but kind of nifty. Oh, and I just thought of something. I think the new polygon will be of such a size to circumscribe the old polygon with each of the vertices located at the midpoint of each of the sides. I don't really want to prove that in ASCII text. Talk about utterly useless, but kind of nifty all the same.

So, I'm here in New Mexico at the Summer Science Program, and everthing is going quite well. I don't have much time to explain, but basically we've just been doing some preliminary things and haven't yet selected our asteroids for orbit determination. Overall, everyone is very nice, although some are a tad on the arrogant side, but I think that will pass when they realize that they actually aren't any smarter than anyone else. I thought I was arrogant and pompous (although unintentionally, I might add)... there are some people here who blow me out of the water completely. Speaking of being an arrogant person, I got my SAT II scores back today, and it looks like Colin Corbett might not be the only SAT Nazi in our quiet quandrant of town. I got 800 on the physics, math II, and US History. Of course, that's only because there's a significant curve for SAT IIs, but it's still in the top few percentiles regardless. Unfortunately they don't show you how many problems you miss online, so I'll bask in this small period of glory before I realize that I actually missed 5+ problems on each. Colin probably is better than me, but I already accepted that. Oh well. As if this egotistical one-upmanship of multiple-choice testing actually had any real significance... Adieu!

I have established somewhat of a tradition in this blog of giving my thoughts at the end of each school year, so I will subject the reader to yet another dose of verbose and vague ramblings. If anything, I would call this year climactic and disappointing. I have reached the first pass, and the other side of the mountain is beautiful, but the meadow and glassy lake are still farther off than I had imagined. Although I had long suspected it, I finally realized what an incredible waste high school has become. This year was a ton of work and it was hard at points, but it never felt as though I was probing my cerebral limits. Nevertheless, I've pushed far enough to glimpse college--the glorious temple of learning that lies before me--and yet I must return to another, and particularly wasteful, year of slogging. That is not to say that this year was a waste however. Indeed it seems that I have accelerated my pace of learning to a rate I have not before achieved. And I think that if there is one thing I have learned this year that is really important, in the sense of being significant for overall living, it is that I think I have finally learned how to learn. Anyone can sit in a class and absorb a lecture and learn processes for doing this, and most people can think too, but I think there is a certain general art of learning. Once one has a grasp of this art, one is capable of learning or teaching oneself almost anything given enough time. Maybe I'm full of nonsense, but I think that this art or "technique" of learning has been probably the most significant thing I have figured out in years, and it is what I remember most from this year. Of course memorable too were the speech and debate marathons that ran for days on end, and the innumerable physics and calculus parties conducted in Jonathan Kadish's basement, and the time I drove with Leeor illegally when he repeatedly bumped into the car in front of us while trying to pull out of a spot in front of an outdoor cafe downtown... and then there was the time at the state speech and debate tournament when Ian--actually, I don't need to repeat that incident. Needless to say, there have been more than a few memorable experiences that encapsulate the zeitgeist of this year--whatever that is supposed to mean.

Fin.

Almost.

I figured out the classes that I'm going to take at Wilson next year, for anyone who wants to compare:

P. 0 - Leadership
P. 1 - AP Spanish 9-10 - Coleman
P. 2 - AP English 7-8 - Meiner
P. 3 - AP Java and possibly systems dynamics if I have time at the end of the year - Fisher
P. 4 - AP Chemistry - Penk

Before I go to bed, there's just one experience I have to record because it was memorable and priceless. I went to discuss math placement with a professor at Reed today, and his office is in the library. It took me awhile to find it because the offices are sort of partitioned from the main library, so I spent a few minutes wandering around this dark and empty building. I walked down a dark hallway, all the doors were closed except for one, my destination. The professor slowly turned to me as he removed his headphones, and he quietly addressed me. It turns out that the guy was extremely nice, if a little quiet at first, but the entire aura gave me the humorous impression that I was in some scene from one of those books like Harry Potter, in which the lone student wanders down the dark, empty hall to meet the instructor mysteriously after hours. The exception is, of course, that instead of getting roasted in some odd cauldron, we talked about math for forty-five minutes--an infinitely more pleasant fate. I think I'm finally getting a glimpse of what I'm wasting away by rotting around in high school for an entire three years.

Warning: Heavy on spew. Low on proofreading.

So scratch everything I wrote in the last entry about classes. I have no idea what I'm doing. I've decided that there's basically no way to take classes at Reed next year because they're all at the wrong time. I just hope that I get into Lewis and Clark. My new strategy is to engage in some carefully-worded begging with the director of special programs at L&C in order to take two classes there next fall: both calc III and E&M, and then just one in the spring. I could then apply for the second half of the year to the program at Portland State that lets high school students take college classes. Such a move would greatly expand my options, opening the doors to differential equations, linear algebra, and group theory--all at convenient times. I talked to a professor at Reed, and they would place me into Introduction to Analysis instead of Multivariate Calc, which I need to take E&M. Math at Reed is very pure and very formal, so they tend to do things in an unusual order that is not very convenient for my interest in physics.

In other news, now that I have finished my year of American literature, I can officially become interested in fiction again. It may come as a surprise to the reader, but I really don't like American authors all that much. There are a few palatable ones, but by and large, I really am and always have been bored to death and completely uninterested in American literature for some strange and unfortunate reason. Anyway, I've finally had the time to really start getting into The Idiot, and it's really good. Myshkin is essentially, at this point in the novel, the character of moral perfection, yet his perfection arouses such mistrust. It actually does seem to make perfect sense that moral perfection cannot exist in an immoral world, because morality (at least in the Christian sense of the word being investigated here) implies a complete and total absence of jealosy, pride, selfishness, etc. In an immoral world, these qualities merely lead to the morally perfect individual's destruction because they render him/her completely defenseless against the immoral exploits of other members of society. The traits of immorality may actually be defense mechanisms against exploitations; to exploit or to be exploited, that is the question. Now that I think about it, this is essentially the reason for the failure of utopian societies. To achieve the completely selfless and "moral state" is inhuman, and immorality triumphs in an immoral world. But I think that society can put bounds of immorality. Our society today certainly has a feel of "bounded immorality", which may arguably be the best state of being. Selfishness is an inherent human trait--the law of natural selection may even suggest that it is an inherent trait of all life to a degree. It can give rise to innovation, technological development, and other achievements through the profit motive, ego motive, will to power, or other impulse. But unbounded it is extremely destructive. So perhaps the greedy, imperfect, yet free society is the best compromise.

And one last thing. The senior prank this year finally pulled through at the last minute, and it was a gorgeous display of wit and taste. They built a rather large Trojan horse out of wood (our mascot being the Trojans), put it in the courtyard at 2AM, and hid in it all day, only coming out just before lunch when several reporters asked to interview them. It was quite impressive, holding at least 15 people, almost all of whom were from our calculus class. What a bunch of nerds. They come back to school after they graduate. What nonsense.

So, my idea of a recursive acronym for the NERD club was axed. We talked with Culpepper and came up with "Noble Experts of Recursive Discovery". So far there seems to be a tremendous deal of interest in the club, which will focus on math and science.

My plans for math and physics next year are beginning to solidify. I have two options. I can take Calculus III in the fall and Discrete Math or possibly Differential Equations in the spring at Lewis and Clark, along with Physics 100 or possibly Physics 200 at Reed all year long. Or, I could take Multivariate Calculus I and II all year long at Reed, and Physics III: Electromagnetism in the fall and Physics II: Waves and Matter in the spring at Lewis and Clark (the order may seem backward, but it actually works out quite nicely). Aside from the content, there are a few more trade-offs. Firstly, physics at Reed is a huge pain because it takes about 7 hours of class, conference, and lab time per week. Furthermore, Reed is a 15 minute drive away at the very best, while it takes about 10 minutes to walk leisurely to Lewis and Clark from my house. The E&M class at Lewis and Clark actually doesn't have a lab component, it's just three hours of lecture per week. The waves class takes up about the same amount of time as the physics courses at Reed, but the scheduling is much nicer (there are four lab sections instead of one). The math classes at Reed go into much more depth than those at Lewis and Clark (notice the 2 semesters for multivariate calculus instead of 1), but they don't cover as much material. I wouldn't get to do differential equations or discrete math, although Reed's mathematics program is heavily focused around proofs like the discrete math course. Finally, E&M is ridiculously interesting, so I would prefer to take that class. First, however, I need to wait to receive some replies for a bunch of emails, and I must meet with a professor or two.

So the verdict is in. Ari Allan-Feuer, Jonathan Kadish, and myself are founding the NERD Club next year. That's right NERD as in N.E.R.D. It's an acronym. The only problem is that we're not sure what it's going to stand for yet, so we desperately need suggestions. I've decided that it's going to be a recursive acronym, so that solves the N, but we're not sure about the rest. The club will exist to discuss and perform things related to math and science, including the American Mathematics Competition, Science Bowl (hopefully), and many, many other things. We also decided on our t-shirt design. The front will somehow show what the acronym means within an infinite loop to explain the recursion. The back... ahhh.. the back is going to be brilliant. It's going to have the Schrödinger wave equation and say, "I'm smarter than you, but you probably have more friends." Nothing could be more poetic.

If my writing is characterized by anything, it is most definitely convolution and excessive verbosity. It used to be worse, but although I have made every attempt to remedy this malady, it is still an overwhelming trait. Over the past two years or so, I have strived to streamline this bloat by using fewer words, but words with far more precision. In general, it has been fairly successful. So, I was spending some time thinking and considering the field of writing, and I came to a realization. There are two very distinct and incompatible styles of writing each espoused by excellent and competent writers. There is the style of writing with the utmost simplicity and comprehensibility. In this style of writing, one should use the simplest sentence structure and vocabulary possible without seeming repetitive or immature. One might say that it's simple without being simplistic. The other style still tends to shun verbosity, but it strives to achieve the maximum precision of meaning regardless of whether it creates a more complex syntax. I have come to this conclusion after spending a lot of time writing papers for various classes in different styles. The streamlined style has been labelled both "clear and effective" and "clinical", while the precise style has been called "excellent writing" and "a bit pompous and pedantic". Where does one draw the line! I think there may really be no agreement on the proper style of writing. I will make one final and important observation however. English teachers tend to favor the precise and wordier style with great regularity over the clear and concise one, while most other people are the opposite. As for me, call me pompous and arrogant, but I enjoy reading words with the utmost precision of meaning, no matter how arcane they may be. I never read anything without a dictionary these days. At the same time there is a usually certain elegance to the most effecient arrangement of words in a sentence that is desirable. I'm hardly anything close to an authority, but have some opinions on the matter.

In other news, I took the SAT IIs in US History, Math II, and Physics. Since I haven't taken US History since last year, I had a little bit of trouble on it, but Math went well, and I breezed through the Physics without a semblance of a hitch. I'm a little worried about my accuracy on the math exam because I worked pretty fast. Considering the curve that is put on the Physics exam (65 out of 75 raw is usually the bottom boundary for an 800), and considering that I missed 3 out of 75 on a practice test, there's reasonable chance that I may get 800. As for the others, I have a hard time knowing because of the varying curves.

"If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."

--William Blake