A Cerebral Burp

My blogging alter ego has been a little speechless and dumbfounded recently. I'm not sure why. Hopefully he'll make up for it today.

SSP has been over for about ten days now, and my reintegration into normal society has been smooth and enjoyable. I'm eating well again, and feeling much better because of my readjustment to a normal sleep cycle and the superior food supply to which I now have access. This past week has been leisurely. I have been enjoying the wonderful and accessable hiking here in SLC. However, a slow realization of my numerous time constraints has motivated me to be once again efficient. Last I checked, school starts in 30 days, and the deadline for the Siemans-Westinghouse competition is October 3.

I recently spent some time thinking about school, and two sentiments came to mind. First, I was overcome with a mild worry by the fact that I am just over 200 pages deep into the Brothers Karamazov--my first book for my summer reading--and I really wanted to read Crime and Punishment as well. I may opt for Dante's Inferno as a backup. The second, and infinitely more interesting feeling was one of immense dread, heading into yet another dolorous year of wasted time. Although I am only taking four classes at a high school, this is far too many. The last year of high school is quite useless if you are even a tad ahead of the intellectual peloton. It represents a barrier of silly requirements, unavailable higher-level/interesting classes, and academic sluggishness between the elementary and the intermediate stages of one's education. In nearly every field, classes at the high school level (regardless of the school) move at 1/2 the pace of college. One year of high school is equivalent to a mere semester at a university. Even the false idol of the academically keen student--the AP system--cannot force this pace to pick up significantly. Introductory high school classes are often prerequisites for the 'advanced' classes, which cumulatively cover little more than a year of standard college curriculum. This pace is slow and painful enough to easily induce boredom in any subject, no matter what the level of interest. Admittedly, I am in one of the best situations possible, having the wonderful opportunity of taking both math and physics classes at Lewis and Clark. But one more year through the slow slog of high school, with all its stupidities and irrelevancies, may cause me to break down. And it may cause you to break down too.

Okay. Enough negativity.

I do a fair amount of reading, both for school and pleasure. Mostly I read only one or two book by an author, but every now and then I will encounter an author that I find to be absolutely outstanding, and I will spend 6 months to a year "binge-reading" books by a single author. This has happened with people like John Steinbeck, Charles Dickens, and Aldous Huxley in the past, and now it has happened with none other than Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I have read The Idiot, I'm currently reading The Brothers Karamazov, and I have the intention of reading every other major novel written by the man. The plots of Karamazov and Idiot are mostly bizarre and cryptic, and they each have a certain female character--similar in both books--who is highly unrealistic but drives most of the conflict. Both books are composed primarily of long-winded arguments about human-nature and various other philosophical topics. Characters regularly speak in uninterrupted tirades that continue for 4-5 pages. Dostoyevsky has this wonderful ability to analyze the intentions of his characters to display the fundamental nature of things like greed, pride, and the role of morality in society. It is great. Absolutely great.

The other object of my energies lately has been the creation of a computer model using STELLA to determine the effectiveness of a number of methods of controlling the Asian rice gall midge, a major pest of rice in Asian lowlands. Jonathan Kadish and I are working together to build and test the model for submission to the Siemans-Westinghouse competition this fall. In addition to the STELLA model, we are hoping to have time to write a numerical simulation in Python that accomplishes the same objectives. We can then compare the effectiveness and predictions of the two models. The main difference between the approaches is that STELLA uses differential equations behind its graphical exterior to produce data, while the Python simulation will create "virtual" midges with certain attributes that are recalculated at each time interval according to certain rules governing the system. The Python simulation allows individuals' characteristics to be tracked along with the characteristics of the population, and could be much easier to use when examining the transmission of genetic resistance to pesticides between generations. It's going to be pretty cool when we finish (I hope). Right now, we have a working (although still not validated) model of an fully functional, isolated midge population with infinite food supply and static environmental pressure, which contains distinctions for gender and each of the four phases of the gall midge's life cycle. The Python model still has a few bugs, but is almost up to the same level of functionality. Right now I'm working on the model of the rice yields. I still have quite a bit to learn about rice, and I have to think some more about the design of the model before I start building it. If you happen to have an immense knowledge of the rice plant, let me know.