A real weekend?

This is probably the first time I've had a weekend I would actually describe as relaxing. Usually I'm loading up on lots of test prep and stuff (which come to think of it, I do have a PSAT coming up.) But anyways, I watched HP 5 with Mark and Andy. It was probably my favorite so far, although I also liked 3 a lot, so I'm not sure.

I think I'm becoming a Canadaphile. Nearly half the artists showing up on my Pandora playlists are Canadian. Eh, they have good indy bands, I suppose.

I think I'm going to suspend the game until math season is over. I need to get really serious, as this is sophomore year. I need that freaking USAMO qualification.

POTD 122

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I really love this sort of environment, where you've got the bridges spanning large expanses and stuff. I need to see if I can find this one really cool old painting I found once.

Anyways I'm finally back, and finished licking my wounds. For those of you who didn't know I did worse than I had expected on a few key tests, which didn't really put me in the mood of blogging. Those scores were 4 on the AIME, and 78 on the second UMTYMP test. Actually my UMTYMP score was pretty in comparison to my classmates' scores, many of whom received something like 48. Anyhow it is pretty good to be back after my four week (exactly!) absence.

The past couple days news in brief is:
*UMTYMP test in little more than a week.
*I'm a student in training for the Minnesota American Regions Math League, again. I was hoping to get promoted, but oh well.
*I'm taking five APs. Comparative Government, US Government, Calculus BC, US History, and Physics B
*I've turned in lots of assignments as usual
*Got two new computers from a friend

With one of those new computers I made a foray into the world of Linux computing. I installed Ubuntu (really easily) and had a load of fun. Screenshot below. Screenshot2.png However, that computer is currently broken, since I installed an nVidia driver incorrectly. Silly nVidia is just another one of Microsoft's goons. I think I might just install Fedora when Core 7 comes out, so that will fix my problem.

Also I wasted some time two weekends ago, and went to the Future Sight pre-release with Kevin. Despite being a complete waste of time it was a lot of fun. The best part is that Kevin and I did really well as a team, so we got prizes. :)

And that's about all for today. Enjoy more onslaught tomorrow. Oh, and by the way, the next chapter meeting (in three weeks) is at a pizza place, food on the chapter.

And one last thing, A Realm Divided has been permanently suspended while we work on a new more snazzy game. Read: one that is actually within my ability as a programmer.

POTD 119

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Gotta love the good old sci fi scenes.

Well, tomorrow is the big day. I hope that I will do well enough on the AIME. And the UMTYMP test for that matter. I'm quite nervous actually. But I'll try and keep that under wraps. I hate waking up to take a test.

POTD 118

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Kratos is supreme!

Time for the gigantic mega post! I’ll have to categorize this one…

Debate:
Wee, four hour mini bus trip. Pretty uneventful actually. So whatever, I’ll skip ahead.

So, the resolution is: “Resolved: The actions of corporations ought to be held to the same moral standards as the actions of individuals.”

Some quick background before we begin:
Common Aff arguments: Lots of harms when we hold corporations differently. These include: letting the individuals within the corporation hide wrong doing, excessive corporate power, disregard for human welfare, and similar things. Really, most aff cases are the same, they almost all state that by holding the corporations the same way we get a benefit.

My aff case: In my frame work I establish that morality is only useful when applied to humans, I.E. that morality only matters if it is helping alleviate human suffering. Thus I set up the value of morality and the criterion of decreasing exploitation. In the framework I set it up so that showing a decrease in human suffering (exploitation, this is explained in case) is enough to affirm. And then I basically lay out the ways in which exploitation is decreased.

Common Neg arguments: For neg there is slightly more flexibility. Some people set up cases similar to the aff cases, that is, they try and show that negating has comparative benefits. On the other hand some neg cases try and prove the resolution necessarily false based on universal principles. Arguments of this sort consist of: morality doesn’t exist, the corporations aren’t morally culpable, there are morally relevant differences, etc.

My neg case: It’s just a pretty standard culpability case saying that a corporation is like a thought concept, so it can’t be morally culpable for its actions. The same way Nazis, and not Nazism is responsible for the holocaust, corporate actors and not the corporations are responsible for whatever action.

Round 1: I was neg. This was against some random opponent. I really thought I won this round, because quite frankly his case was terrible. “Since corporations won’t be held to these responsibilities they will turn into utilitarians.” Umm, okay… No warrant, and I that “harm” is pretty silly. But apparently I lost the value-criterion debate, so he got all of his impacts and thus won.

Round 2: I was Aff. This round was annoying as hell… My opponent made really bad arguments, and terrible responses to my arguments, but I dropped her third contention and her freaking underview. And she was on the neg! All that offense she had made it nearly impossible to cover with the limited time in the 1AR. The most annoying thing was the judge said he really wanted to vote for me, but couldn’t just because of that stupid spread. Ah well.

Round 3: I was Neg. Whatever. Her case was overall just pretty strong, and she was a good debater. I felt like I should have lost that round. But I got 30 speaker points, and my judge said it was one of the smoothest deliveries she had ever heard.

Round 4: Aff again here. The two of use were both running benefit cases, but I had the kid’s case and I outweighed his benefits. A pretty easy round. 29 speaks ^^.

Round 5: Neg here. I adapted to my judge really well, the kid dropped my neg case, I kill his value criterion, it was just a pretty good face crush.

Round 6: Aff… I debated a kid (actually I stayed at his house, and he plays Magic, and he’s an overall cool kid) who set out to have fun at this tournament, so he ran… reptilian illuminati. The case stated that we are all being mind controlled by an evolved species of raptors, the illuminati, and that the only way to free ourselves is through the access of the right side of our brain. All of his cards came from David Ick, founder of the Green Party in England (this is why the Green Party will never win an election.) The case wasn’t actually horrible (if the judge decides to go with debate instincts over common sense that is) because against any response I made he could claim that I was brainwashed by the illuminati, so my argument is just an attempt to cover up their presence. However I responded by drawing a caricature of a illuminati, thus accessing the right side of my brain and disproving the presence of the illuminati. I also said that if the judge would buy my opponent’s argument he would also have to buy my argument my opponent was actually brainwashed by the Lupines, an evolved race of lycanthropes. And he dropped my case, so it was an easy win. I had also contemplated reading a poem to access the right side of my brain, and I spent a lot of prep time trying to write a rhyme. Nothing rhymes with illuminati that I could think of. Anyways, in response to my drawing he said I had drawn it with the left side of my brain, since I did it utterly without emotion or conviction. So during my next speech I acted like I was very upset by that, and I channeled my pure emotion into a second drawing, thus accessing my right side. Then the judge gave me 25 speaker points. If he had given me just a few more I could have gotten a speaker award. What a meanie. Maybe if my drawing was better? But man, I deserved more points for coming up with such a novel response.

Anywho, my final record was 3-3, and no one on my team did much better.

WARNING: Politically Correct stuff galore below!

I found it singularly hilarious that the Lynbrook team had a single white kid. And maybe three guys. I was also quite disappointed that I didn’t get to debate any of them, since I told Aaron I would beat some for him. But my record was too sucky to debate them. And another thing I observed, this will sound weird, but Indian girls should shave! And I mean their faces. I can’t tell you how disconcerting a moustache is on a girl. But that is pretty unrelated to anything else. Besides that the Lynbrook team was full of attractive Asian girls that I didn’t have a chance with… <_< Also, apparently Hopkins has a reputation, because the Lynbrook coach said we were one of the teams to watch out for.

After the first day we went to our home-stay. And stayed up till one telling messed up stories. And the second we watched Blazing Saddles and then went to sleep. Hmm. We also went to a really good Italian restaurant called Mondo’s. It was the first real meal I had had in some time, so I was made mucho happy.

So in summary: I think I could have done a lot better if I had put more work into debate, but I didn’t have the time to commit. I’m still deciding whether or not I’ll be doing debate next year.

Music: Yay! Music!

So I’m probably neglecting to talk about a lot of new bands I got, but I didn’t get those CDs as recently, so I just won’t talk about them

X&Y and Rush Of Blood To The Head, by Coldplay: Well, Coldplay, is one of those bands that I really want to like, but I somehow can’t. The singing is overall subpar, ugh, I can’t even hear him half the time. And the instrumentation although cool, if the same in every song! I’m serious, all their songs sound exactly the same. Not cool. Except for a couple stand out tracks I was very disappointed by Coldplay. I’m not sure what they are aiming for, but they sound like a combination of The Frey and Death Cab for Cutie, and the result isn’t too great.

Franz Fredinand, by Franz Fredinand: This album, was very cool. The guitar playing is cool as heck, and the songs are fun. Yeah, not much else to say, but I like it a lot. Especially Take Me Out, which is a cool song.

And I have a hard calc test coming up, in addition to the AIME on the same day.

Sorry for the long post...

POTD 100

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Reminds me of someone...not gonna name names.

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And a bonus, because it's 100. I actually hate the number 100, we should celebrate 119 instead.

I took the AMC 12B, nothing more to say. And I had soccer. And I got to miss a terrible lecture today, SCORE!

POTD 95

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Three words: wtf. I have no idea what that is, but it looks funny.

So, the OHS student newspaper is suppose to be published today. Which means I'm going to spend the entire night creating the webpage...good thing I had maybe three days of heads up time. <_<>_>

Guess what? Today is Monday! You know what that means? It's time for me to die inside, thanks to Math League. So I won third place in my division. But the division is so pathetic that doesn't really mean anything. And the award ceremony was pretty lonely. And the pizza was pretty bad. Blargh.

POTD 93

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Cool picture...

Hrm, I blew the AMC 12. Blargh I get to go the AIME, but not ARML.

POTD 92

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Good rendition of Michael Jordan. He used to be a hero of mine, back in the day when I read a little book about him. I guess he could still be thought of as a hero, but I usually associate myself with geekier people, like Einstien for instance.

Had an UMTYMP review session today. I can't say I learned and or reviewed anything today, but I did find out that my prospects for getting on either Eden Prarie's or Wayzata's math teams are pretty good. Because if I don't find teammates next year (yeah, I mean you homeschoolers of Minnesota), then I'm not suffering through another year of solitude just to have 'MCGT' in the name of my team.

So pumped! AMC 12 tomorrow. It's my one shot at ARML qualification. (You know, I think I should post a guide to all the acronyms I use through out these posts, because there are quite a few.) From what I've heard I've (amazingly) done somewhat more preparation then some of the Eden Prarie kids.

POTD 89

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Hmm, quite and comtemplative. I like it.

Well, my barrage of tests is complete. Not. I've still got the AMC 12 and the ACT. Oh well. My school tests are done with. For my English test I wrote an essay drawing on four examples fro literature and two from life. Overkill? I hope so. And I got destroyed in my history test. I've never been so brutally maimed in my life. Ah well, lessons learned.

Btw, Super Bowl! W00t. Actually I don't care that much. I'll probably watch commercials.

POTD 82

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For those of you who enjoyed bodyworks. I have to say I admire the amount of work that undoubtedly went into that piece.

Argh, haircut and braces getting tightened. Could any combination of two events be worse?

I finished my ten page history assignment, huzzah! Actually that wasn't huzzah worthy, because I actually had to work my butt of in order to do it. Any sign of effort on my part is de facto not cool.

Some quacky British professor said today (Jan 22) is the most depressing day of the year, for various reasons I didn't care about. However it didn't sound like he was depressed, since he was happily using NPR to market whatever crap he is selling. And you know what? I'm inclined to agree with him. Guess why. It's because math league was today. Man, I had such a good time talking to myself, you know I really hate people. It was great, just me sitting alone, without even a measly book to read. Really, it was awesome, you shouldn't have been there. What the crap, seriously I give up. Next year I'm joining a team. Some team like Wayzata, Edina, or Eden Prairie. Imagine that, I could actually be on a team that held practices, and actually had a competitive shot at doing something. And actually had enthusiasm. And actually tried to improve itself through practice. And actually showed some motivation. Man, that would be the day.

Anyways as a quick wrap up of today's meet:
Event A was easy so I picked up full points
Event C was graded by dumb buttfricking school teachers that don't know algebra, so they didn't know n(n+1) = n^2 + n, so they graded my paper wrong, so they screwed my score, so they screwed my chances of going to state, so they forced me to have to do well on the AMC 12 or I won't qualify for ARML. I can't believe people pay taxes to give such silly people jobs.

I guess I promised a debate post, so here goes:
The journey: Well the ride on the Retard Racer (R) was about as crazy as I thought it would be. Which was very. I divided my team between reading The Silmarillion, creating a debate fight club, and working on various debate related things.
Day 1: The novices weren't actually competing the first day, so I watched a lot of round. One of my teammates did a round in 7 minutes, and won. It was a silly round though, a top ranked debater against some noobsy Nebraska debater that couldn't flow. To quote my teammate "Extend my burden analysis, I meet the burden. You affirm here."
Day 2:
Round 1: I lost off some crappy solvency argue. "He doesn't show that holding corporations to moral standards that respect human beings decreases exploitation." Hmm, that's sort of what my case was doing.
Round 2: This girl sucked. She said "ZOMG CORPORATIONS BREAK LAWS THEIR IMMORAL OH NOES." I said "Law isn't moral, look at the Nazis." Win for me!
Round 3: This round was just mentally retarded. The judge basically constructed new arguments for my opponent, extended his offense, and did all kinds of things to help him out.
Round 4: This was a funny round. My opponent ran a case saying that we should define corporation using the slang definition, which calls it a fat stomach. Unfortunately that played right into my case, which argues that corporations and individuals make decisions in different manners. My entire argument was "Stomachs and People make decisions differently, so you can't hold them to the same moral standard." I loled.

And also I'll do a quick report on music.
Moby: Don't like this guy to much, not great tunes, don't like his vocals much
Stereolab: This band has to be French, because I can never understand a word they are singing, and they have song titles like "Le Demure" and "Cosmic Country Noir." Actually, some of their songs are in English. But whatever, I love them. They have such addicting melodies and stuff, and I don't actually mind the French either.
Daft Punk: These guys are freaking insane, and I like this. Nothing like weird synthesizer voices saying "I am the brainwasher."
The Gorillaz: Andy doesn't like them, but I don't think they are too bad. You really have to watch their music videos to appreciate them.
Hybrid: I like them. Except for when the guy sings, the vocals are annoying.

And I found a book worse than Eldest! Dragons: Lexicon Triumvate. The author likes to go around on forums trying to promote his book by saying "If you love Harry Potter you'll love..." on Mugglenet, and then saying "If you hate Harry Potter you'll love" on some anti-potter site. So anyways he stumbled onto Anti-Shurtugal and wrote "If you hate Eragon you'll love...", after going on Shurtugal.net and writing "If you love Eragon you'll love..." Funny things is the ASers pretty much took his entire terrible book apart. (It's about cyber-dragons fighting in a medieval setting. Yeah.) And then they proceeded to tear him apart. It turns out he is a sexist, and a racist against all that are not Asian.

And I also went to Alanaxh's house this weekend for supper. The food was excellent. However it would seem that I'm unable to make conversation, because there was _waay_ too much awkward silence. And we also watched a Marx Brothers film, which was funny as too be expected. And I did some trading of Magic cards; couldn't get Ben to give up his Umezawa's Jitte, unfortunately. And that will conclude our much too long post.

POTD 76

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Would have been cool except for the gothic/emo fairy wtf.

Hurm, back from another Lonely Math Meet ®. It looks like I'm up in the running for highest scorer on the team, again. What a prestigious award considering the many layers of tough competition I had to go through in order to win that. >.< *asplodes* The Canterbury division sucks so bad! As an individual I'm only tied for last place. If I had two clones of myself our team would be in first place, *TWO*!

I've also got a debate tournament in Omaha next week, which I'm excited for, because long trips with a debate team have a tendency to get INTENSE. But is also means I have much case writing to do.

POTD 75

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Cool details on this. Interesting concept for a dragon also.

Went to two parties last night, sweet. The debate party was mostly us sitting around and talking about anything other than debate, since no one wanted to be reminded that school was starting again. And we watched a movie made by my teammate's euro class called FranceFranceRevolution. ^^ The math party was us talking about football (appearantly all this time math geeks have been ravid football fans I jus haven't known), watching the Cowboys vs. Seahawks game, and playing a large assortment of card games where everyone would be trying to calculate the probability of winning next turn. ^^ Math nerds are funny. And now I have to reenter the real world, where I have to write an article for my student newspaper. :(

And just a reminder, Mathcounts is coming up soon, and we still need a single (1) team member. Remember all you are giving up is about two (2) hours of your life on a Saturday mourning if you decide to participate. Think about, not that much of a commitment, and you'll see friends there. And if you decide you want to practice for it, then I can get you materials, and other stuff so that you an get ready, you just have to show an interest. If you spend maybe fifteen (15) minutes a day doing Mathcounts preparation instead of picking your nose (or whatever else you do to waste time :P) then you'll be super when it's time to compete.

POTD 65

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Haha, go Hendrix!

Yeah whatever... UMTYMP test on Wednesday that I need to study for. >.< But I got a 96/100 on my physics test, so I'm pretty pleased with myself. Party this weekend, with funny (so bad it's funny) movie afterwards! Everyone should come.

POTD 62 + Other Stuff

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Pretty nice geezer. The texturing is nice, and that's some pretty high poly modeling.

Yay, another double UMTYMP assignment. I just love 'em.

Whatever, anyways for those of you doing Mathcounts I'm going to try and give training tips via my blog. If any of you aren't doing Mathcounts and don't want to better yourselves, then promptly ignore everything below.

Probability:

Most of you probably can do pretty basic probability problems such as finding the probability of a coin flipping heads twice in a row. How do you do it? You simply multiply the probability of both events happening, so in the case of the coin flip we have (1/2) * (1/2) = 1/4. So far nothing too difficult, so lets up the complexity.

What is the probability that a ball starting in the blue oval will end up in the red oval, assuming the ball travels down and has an equal probability of moving down each chute?

Obviously the probability the ball ends up in the first oval beneath the blue oval is 1. Now the probability that the ball ends up in the oval above the red oval is 2/3, since the ball has three paths and two of them takes it to the oval we want it at. Now the ball has two choices: to go right and end up in the red oval, or go left. So our total probability is 1*(2/3)*(1/2) = 1/3.

As you might have guessed multiplying probabilities in not the only way find a probability.

Lets consider this problem: Albatross, Bobert, Caddlebot, Deberg, and Eustien are in the senate. Three of them will be randomly chosen to head a committee to study the causes of bureaucratic inefficiency. What is the probability that Albatross will be in the committee? Now the old way of calculating probabilities won't work too well. Another way is to take the total number of possibilities that work and divide by the number of possibilities total. So in the case of this problem we would count the number of committees that include Albatross and then divide by the total number of committees.

Let us calculate the number of committees total. Here we use an operation called "choose". Choose is denoted (b,a) except that b would be on top of a; it's like a vertical parenthesis. (b,a) tells use the number of committees of size a that we can choose from a group of b people. The formula is (b,a) = b!/(a!*(b-a)!), where ! denotes factorial. I think you know this, but just to recap 5! = 5*4*3*2*1 and 0! = 1.

So the total number of committees to form is (5,3) = 5!/(3!*2!) = (5*4*3*2*1)/(3*2*1*2*1) = 10. Now we calculate the number of committees that include Albatross, at this point we could just count them, but that isn't that efficient. A better way is to assume that we have already chosen Albatross, and then we are picking the remaining two members of the committee. So the number of committees that include Albatross is (4,2), since we are choosing two people out of a group of four remaining people. This number is 6. So the probability is 6/10=3/5.

I'll leave you with a challenge problem. A bug is walking on a triangle. A "move" consists of the bug moving from the vertex he is standing on to one of the other two vertexes. After 10 moves what is the probability that the bug will return to the vertex it started on?
Hint: Consider the moves he makes as a series of letters, with R denoting a right turn, and L denoting a left turn.
Hint 2: Think about the relation between the number of R and L turns it makes to where it ends up, in particular think of the number of right moves it must make to return to the original point.

I'll post the solution after a while...

This is definitely the longest post I have ever made. Woohoo!

POTD 57

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Pretty typical sci-fi scene.

My UMTYMP scores have been horrible, except for a thirty. I'm out of practice at math league. Grr. But now that I'm bad at math I'm getting better at other stuff. I got an A+ on a poem, weird. I went to Wisconsin over the weekend for a Davidson gathering. I hate playing sports with these gifted kids; it's soo dull. I ran a kickoff return for a touchdown while talking on the phone; lame. But over the weekend I had a nice chance to write, and my NaNoWriMo word count shot up.

POTD 55

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I'm really liking the 2D art work. Maybe even more than 3D... Cool dark looking image, not sure what it is, but whatever.

Debate was depressing as usual. Knowing that I could have gone to semi-finals, if only I hadn't gotten a first time parent volunteer judge that also happens to beat his wife.

Math League was even more depressing. Knowing MCGT wouldn't have been the last place team if I only had a single teammate.

My grades have been depressing, B/B- all around.

I'm depressing.

POTD 35

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Creepy picture, actually extremely creepy.

Well, there is a lot of stuff going on.

I went to my first debate tournament on Saturday. I was 2-2, should have been 3-1 but the judge messed up. But then it is considered rude to complain about the judging, so I'll shut up now.

I've got a 28 on my most recent UMTYMP homework, and I've got a test on Wednesday.

I've been really busy with all my ohs courses, sigh. I barely finished my philosophy assignment.

And I guess there won't be a math team this year. *weeps* Because apperantly math *isn't* a useful skill that will land you a job, so of course there is no point in learning it right. I wish blogger had emoticons, because right now would be great for an eye roll.

I guess the only thing that is going well is Realm Divided, because I finally figured out Allegro.

POTD 33

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Wow, really cool. That creature is freaky looking, but it something about it makes it seem friendly.

Hmm, not much else to say. The deadline for math team is coming up soon, so I hope people will participate. Otherwise, I'll be a lonely nerd. :(

Ahh, starting the school year again.

Just like the old days, finishing UMTYMP assignments. Other then that not much going on. I'm really hoping I can get a few more people on the math team.