So it’s Superbowl Sunday, and for the first time in my conscious life, I’m too busy to watch. I’ve always watched the Superbowl, but this week I’m not tuning in. The only reason I noticed was because today’s NYT daily mini crossword had two prompts about the Superbowl, and I didn’t know the answer to either. Hate on the Patriots all you want, but at least Tom Brady made it so that everyone knew at least one player in the Superbowl.
Anyways, this is another informal thought dump blog post. There’s a lot of long form stuff that I think would be really cool to write about, but unfortunately I just don’t have enough time. Right now, talking about what’s happening in my life is so much easier than the other stuff I’m planning. I assume this will be swapped in the summer, where there will be some weeks where nothing is happening in my life, and I’ll have the free time to write beautiful philosophical posts.
Contests
Anyways, as I mentioned in my previous post. F=ma and AIME are coming up. Here are my thoughts on them right now:
F=ma: I’m so screwed. I qualified by some god-sent miracle last year, and I have no idea if I can qualify again. I did one mock, and solved 23 of the problems, but only got 11 of them right. Thanks to taking PH650, I can solve most problems because I have the knowledge. However, I don’t have the funky fysics intuition I managed to pick up last year, so I’m probably going to fail.
AIME: Hyped. Taking the AIME 2 is a blessing and curse. You get to mock AIME 1, but you also have to mock AIME 1. Just like last year, I’m left wishing that the score I got on my mock was my official score. However, last year I improved 3 points from my AIME 1 mock (11–> 14), but unfortunately that’s not possible this year (13 –> 16 out of 15?), I guess I’ll settle for a 15 😛 . I wrote a recap: here. After I finish the AIME on wednesday, I’ll also post the stats/answers I got for the other ~10 other AIME sets I’ve done.
What else is on my mind?
I’ve been writing a bunch of really interesting problems for the Choate Computing Contest. I technically might not end up getting elected to the cabinet, which would be really awkward. My proposals makeup 8 out of the 11 proposals we have right now. The other 3 being from my POTW co-organizer) I’m not really sure if I would pull out my problems, I *probably* wouldn’t because the problem security is already way too compromised to be used elsewhere.
N.B. Discord is a terrible place to store stuff. This is the second time I’ve gone to discord to retrieve some information, and each time I get distracted by stuff happening in other channels. The only exception is my personal discord server, I’ll never stop saving stuff there.
Oh, I’ve also been pulled into some mock competitions by some seniors with senioritis and lots of time on their hands (@NS, @KZ, I love y’all lmao).
Snow!
While I’m sad that our brief one-day excursion into the 50s (F) is over, running in the snow is such a vibe. The human brain is so cool, when you’re running, your brain stabilizes your vision so that you don’t notice vertical bounces too much. Because of this, when you bounce at the bottom of your stride, the snowflakes look like their bouncing.
Reposts in the Future
I will also be figuring out the logistics of posting stuff that I’ve written and submitted elsewhere. I’m really proud of this piece talking about the process of discovering ideas through the writing process that I did for English, but I’m not going to post it until I ask my teacher.
I will also at some point post my Three Body Problem review that I did for the Choate News. I would obviously say that “This was originally published in the Choate News.”, and RK says that it’s probably fine.
School Stuff
One thing I’m really happy about is that I’ve finally settled into a mostly stable sports+club schedule.
Monday: Personal Run + Physics. Very Chill
Tuesday: Rowing + CPU. Short meetings 🙁
Wednesday: Rowing + Math Team. I usually end up running it from 5:45pm to 6:45pm, and sticking around with the serious math people until 7:15-7:30pm.
Thursday: Personal Run + Choate Aerospace Association. I bring up cool ideas that I really like from the Three Body Problem. (Which you should totally read!) The only hard part is not spoiling.
Friday: Rowing + Hanging out with friends
Linguistics: Events and Very Long Cabinet Meetings.
Modern (the Choate math class) has been really fun, we’ve just finished Group Theory and I’m going to miss it. For a while, my discord status was “This is what god intended.” For those of you who wondered what it was about, it was in reference to the Group Axioms. The fact that you can get from these stupidly basic, seemingly random axioms, to something as beautiful as Cauchy’s Theorem is kinda crazy. I was also curious if we “got the axioms wrong” and chose the wrong set of group axioms, but the proof of Cauchy’s and other results are too beautiful to be incorrect. Another post I will do eventually is about how the “math is beautiful” statement is inaccurate, and it’s better to think of it as “Damn. This is the field where we are closest to achieving information parity with god.” This is a lot harder to parrot than the “math is beautiful” line, so I guess that’s why it’s not as popular. Or maybe, just like the lottery argument that I thought was common knowledge, this is also novel.
Unfortunately, I feel like I’m the only person in the class who actually knows what’s going on, but that’s fine because I had a blast with that unit.
Research, kinda.
Our SRP class is doing a final interferometry lab unit before we go off in our separate directions working/preparing for our summer labs. Relatedly, I’m kinda miffed about the fact that I can’t attend Wibisono’s reading group due to timing. This is related to the stable club structure that I mentioned earlier, which, since I am unable to drive, means that once I go to New Haven I can’t return to Wallingford. Thus, I can’t go back to New Haven until after all of my commitments, which is way past when the reading group ends.
This may be a blessing in disguise because I don’t know if I have enough spoons to continue doing research through the rest of junior year. (Another one of the long form posts I will eventually do is on commitments and spoon theory). I have also been trying to figure out a way to send RSI a copy of our arxiv preprint. I tried using CEE’s (the mother organization of RSI) contact form, but got no response.
Conclusion
Quick Recap of what I’ve done so far this weekend: Half of 2018 AIME 1 as prep, mocked AIME 2022-1, some personal coding, and most of my SRP lab report. Not a lot to be honest, kind of annoying that I haven’t finish my election statement or lab report yet.
I have no idea why, but I’m feeling pretty good despite everything that’s coming up in the next week. It’s nice being back in the computational season with F=ma, AIME, and HMMT. I haven’t seriously prepared for computational competitions in a while, and I really like prepping for them because the skills necessary to preventing “sillies” on AIME are the same ones that make you more organized and capable IRL. Anyways, I’m going to go buy some flowers for Valentine’s day before the shops close, so see y’all next time!