October 2005 Archives

I've done enough writing for today. I'll finish it all tomorrow. I just stole all three volumes of the Feynman Lectures in Physics off the internet. Let's have a raging party Tuesday evening in celebration of November 1st. I'm not sure whom I'm addressing right now, but that's not important.

There's 58-62 hours left before early action applications are due. I suppose I should start filling them out, eh? Actually, the applications are about 90% of the way finished, and the writing is about 80% of the way there. But it is so painful!

This is kind of an interesting contrast, considering that I'm applying to both of these places:

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2000/03/07/opinion/399.shtml

I especially like the part about students protesting to keep "cumbersome" academic requirements in the core curriculum.

I was looking at the federal financial aid calculator and I noticed that the estimates it generates expect the student to pay 50% of his/her net income and 35% of his/her net assets per year for college tuition. It also expects the parents to pay 12% of their net adjusted assets and just under 40% of their annual income to college tuition. If we assume that a student's marginal propensities to save and invest are close to 0 (probably reasonable because students have low or nonexistant incomes), then this system demands that the student pay about 82% of their net assets in tuition over a four year period. Parents probably fair at least as badly considering they have higher expenses, and they generally pick up the slack for their children who really can't afford anything. The median income for a family of four in the US is about $65,000. This would imply that the family should pay $26,000 of its income for tuition each year. The average private university costs about $42,000, so the difference is about $16,000. So, if the family has adjusted assets of more than about $135,000 (which they had better if they plan on retiring), then they get absolutely no aid. Yikes!! This is all the more reason why I should go to Princeton where there is virtually no cap on financial aid. A family of four with an income of about $150,000 and net assets of about $600,000 receives roughly $10,000 of financial aid/year.

In other words, I'm slowly facing the realization that I'll probably go to some bad, cheap state school like Oregon State. I have a theory that the overall caliber of students there is actually lower than at my school. This is bolstered by the SAT statistic, which indicates that my high school actually has a higher average SAT score than their admitted students. That's pretty pathetic. The total cost is still about $15,000/year though.

I've been in somewhat of a disastrous state recently, and things only seem to be degenerating further. It turns out that on top of all the essays and applications I've been completing, many colleges strongly urge their applicants to have interviews with alumni. At MIT, people who have interviews have an acceptance rate nearly double that of people who don't (they aren't clear on the distinction between causation and correlation, however). So about three weeks ago I called my designated interviewer and tried sending him emails: all of his contact info was wrong. Since MIT is on east coast time and I have no free time until after 2 PM, I had to wake up at 5 AM twice to call the admissions office. They gave me the home phone number of my interviewer. It too failed. Finally after many long phone calls and bounced emails I arranged my interview about 18 hours before the scheduling deadline.

This has been homecoming week which has only compounded the problems. Our new leadership advisor has turned out to be somewhat less than competant. He routinely "forgets" to tell us about important things until immediately before the deadline. He waited a week to inform Leeor of key information regarding the blood drive, he has been completely incompentant in dealing with key homecoming matters, and he has pushed us into an extremely dangerous financial state by making terrible decisions. For example, we just spent $1500 on two nights of lodging for 15 people, and he approved the purchase of an $80 trophy for a completely superfluous purpose. Today he decided to rent a PA system for our assembly instead of use the one we already own. Admittedly it isn't fantastic, but it works well for the job. The PA system he rented was about 1/3 the size of ours and looked like it had been manufactured in the late 1970s. It didn't even have a tape deck, let alone the CD player that we actually needed. In the end, we didn't even use it. (For the record though, despite the flaws we did have, today's assembly was the best one in years.) The leadership fund may actually be in debt. Thankfully the senior class's account is secured and out of his incompetant clutches. I can only imagine what he'll think of next...

"I AM SEX"

--The only text on the shirt our PYJO drummer wore yesterday. It must be the ADHD...

I was reading an article on Coca-Cola in The Economist. Apparently they are receiving a lot of pressure from activist groups because their bottling plants in developing countries are depleting local water supplies, but something that I found particularly shocking is that it takes an average of 2.72 liters to produce 1 liter of Coca-Cola beverage. Phenomenally inefficient. This is putting an immediate end to the little soft-drink and bottled water sipping I once did. It is almost as shocking as my discovery of the inefficiency of meat (it takes an average of 10 calories of vegetable food to produce 1 calorie of meat food). So for now, consider me a strictly water-drinking vegetarian.

The Caltech application features a blank square that's about 20 cm by 20 cm. You're supposed to fill it with something. Not including the essays for the University of Chicago, thinking of something creative to put in it was one of my great worries. I think that I've got something brilliant now, although perhaps a little conceited. At least it's moderately creative.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200511/shunning-college-rankings

I just realized that I have something like 20 essays that need to write for my college applications. This is why I'm going to get rejected everywhere.

"The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people who study these things."

--Richard P. Feynman

Yesterday we made our annual showing on High Five. Our team of Colin, Max, Ted, Jonathan, Kiva, Khalid, and I routed the opposition from Kelso (somewhere in Washington, I'm told), finishing with about 2350 against their 2020. It was pretty fun, we won some free stuff that I will probably never use, and it forced me to stay up until about 2 AM doing spanish homework. I'm pretty sure that I have written more in spanish class this year than I have in english. That says a lot about both classes.

In other moderately interesting news, it turns out that the speech and debate portion of the OSAA is self-absorbed enough to have a coaches' poll to rate the various teams at the beginning of the year, much like you would expect in football or basketball. But remember, this is speech and debate. It turns out that we were rated first and favored to win the state tournament in our dear, rainy state. That's fine and dandy, but it would be awfully embarrassing if we lost, now wouldn't it?

One last bit of humor: So there is a new activities director at Wilson this year. He's a little odd, particularly vague when dealing with financial matters, and atrocious at estimating market demand. First, he wanted to buy 100 license plate frames to resell for $20 each. Would you pay $20 for a license plate frame?--much less one with your high school name emblazoned on it? I think not. Now he's organizing this trip for 15 people from leadership to this conference at the beach. He decided to rent two "huge" houses for everyone. One day he said, "Well, I've got these two huge houses that'll fit everyone; they're costing us like, like, $1200." The next day: "Well, I've got these two huge houses that'll fit everyone; they're costing us like, like, $1400." Inflation must really be out of control after all.

Surprisingly there are seniors who are younger than me, one of whom is Leeor. On Thursday, September 29th, Leeor joined me in making that uneventful leap into the age of 17. It really is a pitiful age. We still can't vote. The only new right we are granted is the ability to see R rated movies legally, which isn't really any improvement at all because no one actually cares if a person who is 16 goes to such a movie. Anyway, Leeor had a very entertaining birthday party on Saturday. I'm not quite sure that there's any way to describe it well. It's exactly the kind of party you would expect Leeor to throw. Simply indescribable.

Although the usual contingent of foreign exchange students didn't show up, a number of noncitizen residents did. Jonathan, Leeor, a girl from Germany, a girl from France, and I were having a conversation about all the trouble that they have had with their visas, green cards (or lack thereof), and stalled citizenship applications. It turns out that most of them came because their parents do research at OHSU. At that moment the incredible hypocrisy of the US immigration policy became quite clear to me. All of the immigrants I know have gone through the proper channels to try to obtain green cards and citizenship and have experienced nothing but misery trying to navigate the infernal labyrinth of the INS. I'm not sure I know anyone who has succeeded in obtaining either yet. At the same time, all of these foreigners are smarter, better at the English language, and more motivated than at least 95% of the Americans I know. These people are brilliant compared to our own citizens, and yet we are spending millions, if not billions of dollars each year to maintain this barrier of bureaucracy to prevent them from becoming legal citizens. This is utter nonsense. These are the people we should be trying to steal from other countries.

True, not all the money spent on immigration control is useless. If we were to stop patrolling the border with Mexico, for example, all hell would break loose, as the US would flood with impoverished workers and public services would be zapped. But does not mean that our method of border control with our southern neighbor is an effective one. Indeed, it too is fatally flawed. The current policy involves aggressively patrolling the border and deporting any illegal immigrants that are found. Of course, the INS can't stop everyone, so a large number--probably over a million each year--seep through the cracks of their defenses. Every now and then the US government grants amnesty to these illegal immigrants by the million, while continuing to force the law-abiding immigrants to face the monolithic bureaucracy in their quest for citizenship. Therein lies the fundamental failure of the current immigration control methods: it is absolutely impossible to prevent loads of illegal immigrants from crossing the border. As long as there is a significantly better life to be had in the US, there will be throngs of Mexicans trying to cross. Trying to stop them is utterly futile. The true solution is to prevent them from needing to come in the first place. By investing massive amounts of money in humanitarian aid and economic development in Mexico, the US could potentially reduce the incentive for Mexicans to make the border crossing. Even if there still were to remain a large gap beween the two standards of living, immigration would nevertheless be drastically reduced. Mexicans have a strong cultural heritage that is often incompatible with US culture, so there will always be a strong incentive for them to remain in their own country, as long as they are not completely destitute. This would be so much more productive than just continually pouring money into the current black hole of deportation, which does nothing to solve the real problem. The only thing standing in the way is US unwillingness to realize that the goal of immigration control cannot be orphaned from humanitarianism and still remain achievable.

Maybe then we can stop giving such a hard time to all of the incredibly intelligent and motivated families who come here to do worthwhile things like scientific research. Until then, while other countries hurl money and citizenship all over the place to try to get brilliant minds to set up shop within their borders, we just give them a gigantic headache and periodically threaten to deport them.