A crazy week

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Yes, I underwent another dramatic makeover. I'm pretty much done.

So, I went to Chicago, and did lots of things that anyone who wasn't there would consider very weird. But anyways, we had an impressive showing, there were like ten people from my highschool, which amounts to about a third of the student population. We explored Chicago, hung around, and did lots of other random stuff. We got lost in the Chicago subway for around half an hour, quite smart I know. And I had bubble tea in Chinatown, so I made sure that I kept up my sacred summer tradition. I also somehow managed to read A Game of Thrones while at Chicago, which is pretty remarkable considering the udder chaos. I also went to Ravinia, which is a sort of outdoor auditorium, and we listened to a bunch of random pianists. This is a stretching of the truth. The truth is closer to "Can someone turn down the music? I can barely hear Jake."

My merry making was cut short by a return home, just in time for the annual Davidson Young scholars gathering. It was a pity that it was right after Chicago, because it felt less fun afterwards. But despite that Magic and Risk and Chess games were won, so it wasn't terrible.

Had a soccer game tonight, tied at 0-0.

Maybe more later, I've committed myself to doing ten hours a day of physics, so we'll have to see how that turns out.

The epic tall will never be recounted now (unless you see me in person and get to reenact it)

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I've heard these are good games, I've never played one however.

Well, I give up on trying to write up my ARML experiences. I will tell you that I won an epic game of Mafia, and that our team came first in the midwest, and 8th in the nation. Go us.

Today I took my philosophy final. Our teacher decided to heed some of philosophies he was teaching, or something, because it really wasn't as scary as we had expected. I did have to write two essays, but he gave out a sheet of expected essay questions, so I had outlines ready.

And we won a very very close soccer game against the Plymouth Titans (I thought they were the Plymouth Tidus for a moment, which cracked me up.) The final score was 2-1, and the winning point was scored within a minute of the end. It was a very good game, I thought. I also managed to collect: a sore should (work of an errant elbow), a ripped up knee (probably someone's cleat as I slide tackled), a large bruise on my thigh (I got kicked in the leg as I slide tackled), and a hurt toe (stepped on by a cleat.) Well, no pain no gain, I suppose.

The amazing adventures (seriously)

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Well, that guy has a nice row of teeth...

So, I guess I will begin my tale on Friday morning, the day of my departure. Well, umm, we all got on a bus. All 37 or so of us. Mostly I was reading Pride and Prejudice, which was surprisingly okay. In fact so okay that my prejudice against books of that nature. We paused part of the way there to get food. Everyone wanted to walk several hundred feet to the nearest Subway, instead of the Burger King that was three feet away. Of course it's also raining, since it makes a better story. Anyways, I'm waiting by the side of a highway for the light to change, and so I'm standing underneath the traffic light post. Soon large drops of water that had been concentrated on the light post are hitting me on the back. To top it off several cars drove by at high speed through puddles. Whatever. And Subway was, well Subway. I'm not really a fan, and I'm certainly not a fan of Jared. Besides, it is expensive.

So anyways, we get back on the bus after getting soaked. Eventually we arrive in Iowa University (or is it U of I? Who cares, it's Iowa.) When we arrive we find that nearly all the passage ways to out dorm rooms have been blocked by construction. This makes the already labyrinth like building neigh unnavigable. Eventually we found a way to our dorms. Getting back out was another matter. The little group I was with ended up climbing up and down fifteen different flights of stairs. Eventually we emerged in the kitchens of the cafeteria, and the cafeteria cleaning staff had a hearty laugh at our expense. Anyways, the cafeteria had large glass walls that looked into the main lobby, so we finally got out. Then we went and played a game of ultimate frisbee. The field we would normally have played on was being torn apart by around fifty five million ton bulldozers and excavators, so we had to improvise. We ended up playing on a very awkward incline, made even more awkward by the inclusion of several trees. But it was a good game in any case. Mismanagement of time meant that I had fifteen minutes to get all the way back to my dorms, walking up several hills and past the John Pappajohn business building, find my way back to my dorm room (I did finally memorize the route), take a shower, and change into nicer clothes. I somehow managed to do all of this, which I found to be highly improbable.

After all that we went to the Brown Bottle, which was a nice Italian restaurant. During the meal we played a game or two of Fluxx. We went back to the dorms, and I was introduced to the game Sheepshead. Apparently it's a German game, but that still doesn't explain to my mind all the satanic imagery. We also played an intensely modified version of Egyptian Rat Screw (otherwise known as Egyptian Rat Killer, and any number of other names). The new rules were that, in addition to the normal slaps, you can slap two cards if they are congruent mod 7, and three cards if they form an arithmetic or geometric progression. This makes for a crazy amount of slapping, and a crazy amount of mathage. Eventually mod 7 was changed to mod 6 because people memorized the pairs too easily (for example Jack 4 was a big hit.) After all this craziness we went to the team meeting, and got our snazy new T-shirts (I can now go around two weeks wearing only math T-shirts.) At around 11:30 I finally turned in.

I awoke promptly at 6:00. Got breakfast efficiently, and made my tin foil hat. Our entire team of thirty people went into the competition with tinfoil hats. The idea was we'd be obnoxious, conspiracy theoryie, distracting, shiny, and oh, did I mention obnoxious? My hat was closer to a headband than a hat, but it still reflected the sun into people's faces. The originator of the idea wore two tin baking pans on his head. It was surprisingly effective at catching rain. In fact I've never before heard a bus driver say "You're gonna have to empty your hat." Anyways finally the glorious ARML competition!

To be continued... (I'll have more ARML, info on the soccer tournament we won, and more random junk)

Way to end on a cliffhanger, I know. I gotta get you coming back here somehow.

Being Studious Is Tiring

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This is a really thought invoking piece, I think.

Boy, I've been reading Strategies of Containment by John Gaddis, and I must say both my eyes and brain have been suffering from the strain. I just don't like comprehending the strategic options of the Cold War. I also finished reading The Dominion of War which was slightly less of an eyesore.

Other than that we had a scrimmage with a rec (recreation) league team. You might think that a traveling team should be able to utterly slaughter a poorly manned youth rec league team, but apparently this is not so. I suppose there are several reasons we only won 4-0. Among these are: a. we were missing lots of people (in fact the game started as 4 vs 7) b. tiny field c. tiny teams d. sore from yesterday e. don't feel like playing soccer yesterday f. generally lazy. We didn't take it very seriously. As a result I played forward for some time, not going to happen in a real game.

Okay, I guess I've run out of junk to talk about.

Another resounding victory!

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Huh, looks sort of like a pumpkin to me.

So soccer was good today. The field was much better than our last field. The rain made things a little slick, but it was okay. Anyways we won 7-0, each goal made by a different person, including one of their players. As you might be able to imagine things were pretty uneventful for the defense. The hi-light (for D) was when I "took one for the team." I did the little dance which indicates that I'm sorry I'll never be able to meet my children... It hurt like bloody hell, but whatever.

And I'm now officially obsessed (it took a long time for me to spell that correctly, so appreciate the fact that it is) with the band Scissors for Lefty.

Songs from their MySpace
Songs from their other MySpace
I guess I would loosely describe them as dance rock, but since they are indy they are quite experimental. I really like their beats, personal preference I suppose. In particular I really really like Softly The Sun Swallows The Sea (it's in the second link); never before has being killed by a great white shark ever sounded so awesome.

Ugh, I have a whole load of busy coming up. So much that I will tell you about it now, so you'll be able to tell the medical examiner my cause of death. Since I was preoccupied with my other studies I ignored physics and programming to some extent, and now it's coming back to bite me in the butt. And I've got the usual philosophy paper, 5-6 pages, however I sort of like this prompt, so hopefully it will be fine. And some little English assignment on global warming (in which I recommend not relying on trees, and actually cutting down some large rain forests.) The thing that concerns me the most is my history assignment. 10-15 pages is not a pretty sight, anywhere. Can anyone say yay for Cold War? No, because it was bleh. I had a B+ on my latest philosophy paper, which is okay since the teacher is a fairly hard grader.

Eh

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That's really cool. If I ever end up super rich, I think I'll make one of the rooms of my house like that.

So I had a soccer game. We played Minneapolis Westside, which was a pretty good team. And the field was really small, a major disadvantage to us. And we lost 0-3. But they played really well, so I'm not too upset by the loss.

And then I went to the chapter meeting, which was good fun. The only problem was I was so thirsty that I drank around 3 to 4 cups of pop, leaving me quite bloated. Also, Mafia is better when the average attention span of the players is great than 5 seconds.

Stuff going on

Instead of a PotD I'm posting the Star Craft II CGI announcement



About time.

Anyhow, tomorrow we have the chapter meeting at Divani's! Pizza's on the chapter! So you should all go. And I have a soccer game, so I'll be late to that.

w00t Soccer

But first the always dependable (sometimes dependable) POTD. I think I'm officially changing the capitalization to PotD to make it more correct. After all nobody writes POTC. Well, almost nobody.

POTD

I like this piece, it's got a nice authoritarian feel to it. Sort of like my nationstate. Only so far I've managed to resist the temptation to become a dictatorship, right now I'm just an inoffensive centrist democracy.

So, the soccer game (incidentally my first game, and my team's second), which will obviously be the hi-light of this post was very good. Very good as in we won. The score was 6-0 in fact. The last game was 1-2, so one might ask, what was the difference between the two games? My presence, of course. Just kidding. I think our team played very well actually, and we applied a lot of effort, which is always good. The other team was more than slightly demoralized by our 4-0 lead at the end of the first half, so they didn't put as much effort into the game. I'm really glad we snagged several of the Hopkins players from the Hopkins team, because one of those players scored four goals today. And I got my first few slide tackles in today. It's truly a great feeling :P

Another busy day

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Had my timing been better this would have been shown on Easter, but oh well. I hope you guys had good Mother Days, they certainly deserve the appreciation.

Well today I had the AP Physics B exam, as many of you already know. I did do about as poorly on it as I had expected. After taking so many standardized tests I've gotten a sense of what I'm ready for and what I'm not.

Then I went on to soccer practice. Endurance is clearly an issue for me. Killers (run to the middle of the field, and back, then to the end of the field, and back, rinse and repeat) should not be as hard as they are, but oh well.

Btw, I would recommend reading Reinventing the Bazaar by John McMillan. It's an interesting (and sensible (hard to believe when it's philosophy, I know)) blend of Robert Nozick's libertarianism (minimal governmental intervention in lots of things) and other philosophers that want a more socialist state. Yes, it's true I did recommend a book from my philosophy course, odd as it is. Actually this guy is pretty readable. Unlike a certain John Rawls.

One other thing. I nominate Bingo for world's most terrible game. Who wants to play a game where all you can do is passively read numbers off the charts? There is no way you can actually influence the outcome of the game. And if you had managed in anyway to find a "strategy" to use during a game of Bingo, you would be promptly accused of cheating. I mean, how more boring could it get. You might as well just play a game of flip the coin, or roll the d20. Playing bingo was pretty much the hi-light (other than the good food) of our mother's day celebration. Our game of Apples to Apples Junior was almost as bad, since I could predict my cousins predictable (yes, I do know I'm being redundant) decisions a year before they happened. Apples to Apples is one of those games where the amount of fun is linked directly to who you are playing with, and in this case it wasn't too fun. The silly Junior part also made it impossible to create fun by creating twisted and perverted meanings. So pretty much, it wasn't too fun.

I wish I had kept closer on pace in my physics course

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Hmm, this is a weird picture.

Well, when EPGY first conceived their new high school I don't think they remembered to adjust for the fact that their students would be way more busy than the distance learner taking an odd class here or there. As a result everyone in the high school is behind in either a math or a physics class, sometimes both. Unfortunately I'm one of those people, so I'm not prepared for the physics AP test tomorrow. Oh well.

ARML Chances...good?

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I wish I had a pet like that. Life just ain't fair, is it?

Well, I found something cool out. There are four empty slots on the ARML team, and five students in training. So I should have a very good chance of making the team. Today's practice was pretty good. Although I did rather poorly on the individual rounds, apparently so did a lot of people. However I wrote two proofs for the power round, and my relay team ended up with full possible points.

Not too much else going on. My newest game project is actually progressing somewhat well. Maybe at the end of the summer I'll have a game complete. Maybe.

Whew, I'm still here

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Tomorrow is mucho busy

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The cool thing is I watched Andy play this scene...

Btw, check out Sealand, it is freaking awesome. I think I will try this sometime after I've made my fortune.

Super busy week!

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I'm not exactly sure what the function of anything in this picture is, but it looks pretty cool. Sort of like iPod meets five tons of stainless steel.

Well, I'm now entering the week of terror. Tomorrow I'm taking AP US Gov, and Comp Gov in the morning and going to UMTYMP for a review session, and then I'll be missing my soccer practice.

And then Tuesday is relatively peaceful...

And on Wednesday I'm doing the AP Calc BC exam, and then straight onto my linear algebra final. And I'm missing a soccer game. This point in time would be a very good one to crack a joke about my participation in sports :P

And then I get some peace again before more exams.

New Music

POTD

Architecture, not much else to say.

I'll spare you all the recounting of my adventures in Linux, since it will probably bore everyone but Andrew to tears. So, on to the music.

Mmhmm by Relient K
Well, this album is generally good. A few songs sound a little bit generic, but whatever. I have to say this isn't a terribly experimental band. Oddly enough I actually like the acoustic versions of their songs better than the usual one, maybe it's because I heard the acoustic versions first, or maybe it's because I'm not particularly impressed by their electric guitar. Despite all this, I still like the album. And yes Andy, if you remind me I will bring the CD over...

Is This It by the Strokes
The singing in this album is terrible to be frank, but singing has never been the Strokes' strength. However I just happen to like something about this band (I think it's the guitar, or was it the bass?)

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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.

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Whatever.

Life has been pretty uneventful. I'd report my homework, but I don't feel like it. I decided to take up writing again, because programming is getting annoying as a hobby. And I got a A- on my core paper! Appearantly despite my poor choice of topics I executed okay.

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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.

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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...