April 2006 Archives

We had an unfortunate match in the first round of the playoff bracket, in which our opponents dominated us rather thoroughly. While their knowledge base wasn't particularly superior to ours, they had a definite advantage in speed. It was quite an experience to face off against opponents even faster than us, for superior speed was our principle advantage in the regional competition and in the earlier rounds at nationals. Once they had an edge early on, psychological momentum carried them through.

I hate to prognosticate, but it looks like Thomas Jefferson will be picking up their 5th consecutive national title. They will, as long as they can hold off Santa Monica, another particularly hot team of late. Tomorrow should be interesting.

I have two long entries on my computer from the Detroit presentation, but I haven't had the necessary WiFi access to post them; I'm currently using a public computer. At this point, however, we have won $1750 for the school by taking first place in the hydrogen fuel cell construction and speed race. Today we began the main competition, having the seven rounds of round robin play in a division of eight teams. We are 6-1, having lost slightly to a team that only managed to go 5-2. We beat the other team that went 6-1 (which incidentally was 6th in the nation last year, with three returning seniors and deep experience), breaking the tie between us, and handing to us the final status of 1st place in the Einstein division. There are eight total divisions, and as we head into the 32-team, single-elimination bracket, we are seeded against the 4th place team out of the Fermi division. Unfortunately, the Fermi division is stacked with some of the toughest teams in the game: Thomas Jefferson (1st place for the past 4 years), Mission San Jose (2nd place last year), Santa Monica (who just beat Mission), and a few other seemingly powerful teams. The elimination bracket begins tonight. Hopefully we can escape the best of Fermi's log-jammed, powerful top. Nevertheless, considering our progress, I think we have a chance. We've been solidly winning our matches, even with our lamentable lack of competitive biology knowledge. Consider: we have about 11 years of physics experience among us, 8 years of calculus, but just 3 years of biology. Vamos a ver...

Of all the words in the English language, very few please me like "domination." It sounds exactly like what it signifies... but I like the meaning too... a lot.

At the ceremony for the Academic All Stars competition, we employed a bit of this lovely word. While we didn't have as many finalists as some of the other schools for the simple reason that fewer people applied, we made up for quantity with quality. Out of the nine subject areas of competition, Wilson people took 1st place in four categories, and had finalists in three others. Jon took 1st in Social Studies, Mathew Polzin was 1st in Computer Science, Kiva Oken was 1st in All-Around, and I won 1st in Science. We each receive $2000. Colin Corbett was a finalist in Performing Arts, Molly Dischner was a finalist in Language Arts, and Allen Waters was a finalist in Mathematics.

I apologize if my blog has turned into a laundry list of results from academic competitions, but that is basically all I have been doing recently. It will all wrap up in about a week or two.

I'm done.

Terminado.

Gracias a dios.

After introducing some rather aesthetically objectional "fudge factors" (i.e. a few experimental coefficients and one horrific atmospheric correction term that adds several degrees Kelvin) to force the model to fit global data from 1960 to 1996, and cutting at least two gigantic corners, it works--rather well, I must add.

Things just started working, albeit in a highly simplified version of my grand unified model.

It's probably bad that I'm redoing the entire climate component of my model a day or two before it has to be completely finished and presented...

"MIT still rejects 73 percent of its female applicants. But the school rejects 88 percent of its male applicants and still ends up with a student body that's about 57 percent male."

--Not that I would have gotten in anyway, but I just thought it was interesting to see how schools that have a severe gender imbalance deal with their situation. In the long run, it's probably for the better this way. After all, despite the dismal biotic potential of the male population at MIT, the female population at Harvard is still a relatively finite resouce. From: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06046/655194.stm

The past couple days have been a bit sad. We shipped ourselves off to the state speech and debate tournament on Thursday evening and woke up to do our preliminary rounds yesterday. It's the last year for about nine or ten of us on the team, and we were hoping to make it one to remember. Jonathan and I were already bitter about being unjustly knocked out of the running in the district tournament (as it turns out, we have beaten both the 1st and 2nd place teams in public debate this year, as well as most of the teams that quarterfinaled). With the exception of the sacrificial cross-examination debaters that competed, most people garnered a place in the semifinal round. Kibe didn't make it in expository though--a great travesty, considering that he was the champion last year. As semifinals and finals passed, the hopes of glory faded: even after giving one of my better speeches I was knocked out in semifinals in extemporaneous, Beth and Jamie fell out of the running, and our debaters were knocked out in quarterfinals. Even more excruciating was the variance in the judges' rankings. In perhaps a third of my rounds one judge ranked me 1st in the room, while another ranked me 5th or 6th out of 6 or 7. Having such a variance does not inspire confidence in the justice of the rankings. In the end, Hannah won humorous, I placed 2nd in radio commentary, and few others finaled and placed, but nothing like what we had hoped for. In the final radio round in which I placed 2nd, I was ranked 1st, 3rd, and 6th out of six by the three judges. You can tell that I really feel good about that one...

Today ended with a somewhat lackluster 4th place finish to an interesting four years of speech and debate. It's 4th place out of 25 or 30 teams, though, to put it in perspective. Yet, I think we placed our expectations too high. Speech is at least as much about luck as it is skill, and last year we were very lucky with our success that nearly allowed us to win the state tournament. This year, the luck was bad when the time came. I'm still happy though: 4th place is still better than most, and I placed in an event. Westview won the day, with their cross-examination and policy debaters, that really are only opposed by a few people at Barlow and Ashland--the only schools that seriously do those events. It was a fine end, but not a great one. I don't think I shall ever debate again.

Now I must go work like I have never done before. I really don't want to.

Over the next ten days or so I'll be doing an interesting experiment in stress and traveling. The first leg of this journey begins in about ten minutes, when I embark to the hideous township of McMinneville for the state speech and debate tournament, but things will improve when I fly off to Detroit and then Washington DC for various other events. Things are looking rather indeterminate in many ways, as the economist would say. The prospects for speech and debate success are mixed: we'll probably do well, but not as well as the championship prognosticators among us hopefully predict. My global warming model is also an amalgam of good and bad. The carbon cycle component works frighteningly well, predicting CO2 levels in the atmosphere within 1% or so of actual values over the past 40 years. Despite the success of the carbon cycle, it is still missing many biotic feedbacks, which are nearly impossible to model because of a dearth of information. On the other hand, my climate component is still a royal disaster. In the absence of non-solar radiative forcing, it predicts an equilibrium atmospheric temperature of 264 K, an oceanic temperature of 317 K, and a land surface temperature of 223 K. I'm seriously considering gutting the ocean and land components and just using a highly simplified atmospheric temperature model with some fudging in the radiative forcing, to make the model comply with reality. I present it before an audience of unknown size in six days.

Anyway, this is the state of my existence. I barely sleep. I subsist on tea, Japanese rice crackers, and spinach salads. That's all for now.

I just returned from Model UN this afternoon, where Jonathan and I redeemed ourselves once again by taking control of the General Assembly (B).

I had to arrive late because of a presentation in my economics class at Reed, so I missed most of the substantive debate on our one topic. During this time Jonathan (as Vietnam) steered the committee, gaining broad support for a heavily amended resolution on preparations for natural disasters. When I came in, we were moving toward debate on resolutions from subcommittees.

A surprising number of resolutions dealt with furthering women's rights, family planning services, contraception, and sexual education. After all, beyond just general education, the protection, education, and empowerment of women, aimed especially at lowering fertility rates, probably represents the most effective means of correcting problems of inequity, poverty, child abuse, and so forth. Representing Pakistan, I led the charge against these acts of what I declared to be "cultural imperialism." In the end, I think the committee and I were able to suppress all but one of these "culturally insensitive" measures. It is always interesting to see what happens when Arab bloc nations and Muslim nations are more active than the big five or the other major economic players. Another interesting development was an intense rivalry between Vietnam and Cuba, who also were some of the most active delegates. I think Cuba ended up deadlocking itself a little bit by dogmatically opposing every position that Vietnam took. As Vietnam, Jonathan was substantially more reasonable and palatable, except for when he stood up twice and effectively said, "What I like most about Cuba is how he stands up, talks, and everything he says makes absolutely no sense."

Lastly, and most importantly, Jonathan and I picked up both of the speaker awards given out in our committee. I was the best "defender of policy," and he was the best "consensus builder." Kim and Jacek (a freshman, and our successor in so many ways) also received awards in their committees. Oh, how we love to dominate people in verbal arguments... especially in unison.

While I have barely more than 1 month of school left, the end seems so far away. True, the end might not be so near, for I may not graduate on time--it seems that the people who run health credit by exam decided to change their requirements much to my disadvantage today. But, assuming that I do go to college, I estimate that I will have 22 hours more free time each week. That's like having an entire day more of time! College may be "harder" but at least it will be that much more pleasant than my secondary education.

In other news, if there were a registry of people against whom I have serious grudges, Ashley Skoch would be at the very top of the list. Not only did she have the impudence to not do ANY of her topic papers for Model UN, but she only told me that she was going to be incapable of completing them (due chiefly to incompetence and laziness) at 10 AM this morning, giving me approximately 21 hours to do them for her. Highly offensive. Luckily, Kiva and I are splitting the work a little, but I still have to finish up my last position paper for the notebook and then do six topic papers for the Model UN failures. Why does one fail at doing trivial work for Model UN and then not inform me of it until the last minute (that last part is what I find offensive)? Because one is a failure at life.

The district speech tournament was today. We pretty much dominated the field. Out of the eleven individual events, I'm pretty sure that we won first in something like 7 of them. I personally picked up first in Radio and Extemporaneous Speaking. While I think Wilson has good odds of picking up another trophy in the top five at the state tournament, I'm not making any predictions. Things are just too variable. On the other hand, I will say that if you plot a linear regression of our placement at state over my tenure at Wilson (2003: 5th; 2004: 4th, 2005: 2nd), we will do better than first place this year. Unfortunately correlation doesn't imply causation...

After by far the greatest streak of debate victory and success in known Wilson history--17 consecutive wins coupled with winning 3 very competitive tournaments in a row--Wilson AK, the name that struck fear into the hearts of every opponent, is no more. In the district tournament, we became the victims of the arbitrariness of debate. We narrowly were eliminated from the tournament after losing two rounds. In one of them, it was completely and totally clear that we smashed our opponents. The other was closer, but I genuinely believe that we won.

I spoke with the judge afterward, and could not disagree more with her basis for judging. Essentially, she thinks that you can debate whether a policy "should" be enacted without considering the feasibility of its implementation. In her eyes, feasibility extends to any factor or consequence that would make the implementation undesirable. The only remaining ground on which the opposition can then argue is by simply trying to prove everything the proposition says to be false. Generally speaking, this is an extremely bad tactic, if not impossible. Under her judging paradigm, if the resolution reads, "Policy X should be enacted," and the proposition defines "Policy X" in such a way, for example, that would require vast and very indefinite quantities of money, then the opposition cannot use costs (even if they are infinite!) as an argument. Her stance was that ideas are "good" or "bad" entirely independently of their consequences that would render implementation impossible or totally destructive and counterproductive. By logical extension, her paradigm would probably consider a government gift of $1 million to each American as a "good" idea. It would also consider communism to be another fantastic idea. It is, after all, a utopia. The fact that it always ends up a wretched failure because it is inherently impossible to achieve, is entirely immaterial in her analysis. Utter absurdity.

Another problem could have been that Jonathan and I have an extraordinarily aggressive and hyperactive style, especially on opposition, that may have possibly offended some judges. We ask questions of our opponents mercilessly, attacking their ideas, burning their time, and disrupting their flow. Our opposition strategy essentially amounts to putting forth a countercase and using time to force the proposition to spend most of their time on our case, leaving their own case undeveloped. Granted, we tend to be disarmingly polite before the rounds, but the style is definitely very confrontational. We aren't the greatest speakers, but when it comes to logic and finding "inherent flaws" (my favorite catchphrase), we make up for it. But alas, it failed today. We debated at a level at or above our recent performances, and our opponents weren't much better than the long-run average. Beyond that, it just comes down to a lot of randomness and judges (i.e. a lot more randomness). We were not in fate's favor.

But, not to denigrate the performance of everyone else... They did fantastically! Abraham and his newbie partner are district champions in Cross Examination! Colin Corbett took 3rd and Carolyn 2nd in LD! As far as public goes, Kim and Kibe made up for our misfortune, taking 2nd.

But debate is over for me. For good. It's a little sad.

I hear Chicago has a good debate team, though...

The wonderful thing about liking lots of different activities is that when you do one for a very long time, switching to another makes the new one incredibly satisfying. I haven't written much in awhile, and I just finished writing a graduation speech. I'm not sure that it's very good, for I don't really know what a graduation speech is supposed to say, but it has a tone that I really like. It certainly won't top Kyle Stoneman's graduation speech three years ago that talked exclusively about the conjuction "but," but (ah, haha, I'm in a witty mood) however it is, it is certainly rife with what some would call "Adamness". I talk about my favorite English teacher, social welfare functions, masochism, German, and there is even a quaint little call-to-action at the end. It risks being a shade cliche, but the very notion of a graduation speech is inescapably cliche.

Tell me if you want to be added. Italics are where people will attend.

Gregory Tainter: Oregon State University, Washington University at St. Louis, Lehigh, Duke, Tufts, and the University of Pennsylvania

Maxwell: Princeton University

Kiva Oken: U of O, Occidental, Whitman, Carleton, Pomona

Jonathan Kadish: Pomona

Colin Corbett: St. Olaf, Rochester, Oberlin, U of O, Pomona

Rebecca Corbett: Whitman, Willamette, and University of Puget Sound, Occidental College

Kimberlee Pelster: The University of Chicago

Ted Sanders: Cornell, Harvey Mudd, Rose-Hulman, Northwestern, UCSD (full scholarship), Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins.

Beth Ford: NYU, University of Missouri

Emily Priebe: Northwestern University

Dare I predict that Jon, Kiva, and Colin all end up at Pomona? While I would be happy for them all, that would be a very strange mix of people to go to school together for 8 years straight... or in the case of Kiva and Jon 18 years straight.