The past week was terrible. Thank god it’s over. Anyways, I took Sunday off and I’m fully recharged now. In the morning I watched some of a movie and caught up on some SNL, and in the afternoon I got back onto the Olympiad grind. The next major contest is USAMO (and mayhaps APMO?). Doing Olympiad Math is my bread and butter and I’m so glad I have time to start doing it again. I hadn’t posted a solution on AoPS since January 15th, and I’ve finally broken that today with three solid solves: {ISL 2002 A2, USAMO 1999/6, ISL 2016 G2}, and I’m still working on USAMO 2018/3.

This week was hectic, and since I did another life-update-ish kinda thing last week, I’ll just do a day by day. Long-form essays are incoming in future weeks, hopefully.

Monday – Lab Report + Valentine’s Day + Election Statement

I spent a lot of time finishing up a SRP lab report. It was 8 pages of beautiful LaTeX and lots of figures. I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of writing full lab reports with abstracts and all the fixings. An unfortunate consequence of our school system is that in the end my perception of the quality will be influenced by the grade more than my personal feelings.

In order to lighten the load, I decided not to apply to be a day student prefect. They don’t really do anything anyways. The people I really feel bad for are the boarders applying to be prefects in dorms. That application is SO important for them. The Heads of Houses get to read and rank their applications, so those essays essentially determine whether you get placed into a super nice dorm with cool people and have a great senior year, or if you get shoved into a dorm where you know nobody and have a massive QoL decrease.

Didn’t do much special for Valentine’s day b/c this week is really busy for everyone. I also got my CPU election statement in, it was a clean piece of writing, unlike these blog posts 🙂

Tuesday – School Meeting + F=ma

To start off the week, I did a school announcement! We (The Linguistics Club) were announcing a Wordle Tournament, and got a slot during school meeting. It’s kind of amusing because I always assumed that my first announcement would be about some math comp like USAMO or HMMT.

I had an in-school physics test in the morning, and then F=ma B in the afternoon. I *still* can’t discuss F=ma, which is really stupid. It doesn’t really matter though because my accuracy is really low, so since I haven’t checked answers with anyone, I have no idea how I did.

Wednesday – AIME!!!!!!! :sob:

AIME Distribution: 00111 11111 11100

I can’t believe I threw problems 1 and 2. For both of them, I misread what they were asking for. I misread “how many adults” as “how many people” for Problem 1(11:25 ratio between these), and I got Azar’s probability instead of Carl’s probability for Problem 2. I spent a lot of time on P14 so it’s kinda sad that I didn’t get it, but there were also lots of details. P15 was just plain scary and hard, and I’m glad I didn’t attempt it.

I went back and made sure to reread all of the problems, and I probably read each of 1,2 at least 3 times. As a postmortem, I have a couple of plausible explanations for why I misread.
1: I wore earplugs because we were in person, and that messed with my reading.
2: I’ve been reading too many technical papers and sci-fi novels, where I can skim and don’t need to grab every detail.
However, if I had just read with a highlighter in hand, I would not have misread any problems.

Thursday – brief break

I had a brief break from contests, but I also had a big English essay due the next day. So, I worked on that essay from 8pm-2am. For the first time in a while, I procrastinated. It was a terrible feeling. Anyways, this allowed me to be awake when *the letter* started circulating around 12:30am.

Friday – Protests + 2k erg

Big day. A letter calling out the treatment of faculty circulated around the student body and ended up getting around ~440 signatures. It also called for a walkout. My history, physics, and math classes were mostly fun, and my english class got cancelled. I used the time to edit my english essay and I also learned that querying websites in my code makes me feel like a god.

I also had an erging 2k. I rowed a 7:37.1 (1:54.3 avg) . I don’t know if that’s fast, and I don’t even know if that’s faster than my freshman year time.

Saturday – HMMT

From 8:30-10:00 I attended Choate’s college kickoff. I wish that I had chosen to attend remotely. I then got in a quick 3-miler before the 11:00 HMMT orientation. As for HMMT, it did not go great. However, given the week I’ve had I don’t really care:

Team: We solved first 4. I solved 1,2,4 and wrote up 2,4.
Alg & NT: solved 3
Geo: solved 4
Combo: solved 4
Guts: We were briefly on the leaderboard at 7th place 🙂

HMMT has never been my contest. However, PuMAC is just around the corner. I love that competition, the organizers are so nice and the problems are really good, so I’m going to do some prep for that and see if I can do as well as I did last year.

Closing Thoughts

In other news, I’m really looking forward to Spring Break. There’s a bunch of stuff I want to do, including:

1. Write sci-fi. I have an amusing premise about a possible future financial system, but turning it into a full story will be quite hard. I’ve already asked CW for help 😉
2. Make a “word averager.” This is motivated by a real world issue where I was trying to find a neutral word to describe having done a lot, something between “burned-out” and “experienced.” My current working strategy is to define d(A,B) of two words A,B as
   d(A,B) = 1/(x+1) – 1/2
   where x is the “cosine similarity” of the two words defined using the word2vec dataset; I think it’s the same similarity score as semantle b/c why not.
   
   The, I define the average M of two words A,B as
   M = argmin_m {d(A,m)^2 + d(m,B)^2}
   There are a bunch of other plausible definitions that I’ll play around with to get the best possible effect.
3. Learn c++ and/or get good at CP. USACO February and Open are coming up, and it’d be a shame for me not to have a go. However, with the very limited prep time I have, I feel like it’s optimal in the short term to just stick to Java.
4. Finally, grind for USAMO! We’re back baby. After wrapping up the last two weeks of the term, I have spring break and then USAMO is in the first week back to school. I love doing olympiad problems. They were my life sophomore year, and I’m so glad that I’m getting back into it.

Hopefully, next week will be pretty chill and I won’t have too much stuff in the last week of classes and finals week.
SRP: ~2 lab reports due some time (idk when)
History: Big Exam next next Monday (8 days from now)
Math: Presentation on GA(1,11), but I already have a lot of the math done
Physics: Final exam, but it should be chill
English: We got an extension on our big essay until Tuesday, but after that we don’t have any major stuff.