Insane People Used to Sit at My Desk

My desk in chemistry had these exact words written on it: (different fonts represent different handwriting, if you didn't already assume that)

The cake is a lie!
The cake is a spy!
And if you eat it
You will die! Uh, no.

The cake is actually
NOT a spy!
It's a yummy food thtupid!!!

My living will and testament!

~ ~ ~
(Yes, I actually took the time to write that down.)

-Rebecca

Yeah, Well Your Face has Zero Entropy!

This is a real conversation I had today. Warning: This will probably not be funny to anyone who hasn't studied astronomy, physics, or fractals.

Him: Fire is alive and zebras are plants. And there's no such thing as quantum physics. La la la la la. Determinism works on very small scales and silk fiber-optics are the future.

Me: STOP you're breaking physics!

Him: And eventually everyone's brains will merge and Ray Kurzweil will change gender without anyone noticing

Me: *attempts to glue back together*

Him: The US economy isn't collapsing and one is two for large values of one. Alright, alright, I'll stop.

Me: It's already broken!

Him: An object spouting crap tends to continue doing so. Until... er... well, it doesn't stop. It's a free energy machine! Heehee.

Me: Ahhhhhh! Now you've done it! It violates entropy!

Him: Releasing copious amounts of methane and breaking physics.

Me: You've broken physics into Cantor dust. It's so broken it has a fractal dimension of 1.2.

Him: Your mom's Haussdorff dimension is greater than her topological dimension.

Me: Oooh well your face's topological dimension is imaginary!

Him: Your grandmother's face is a PMS star!

Me: You're a visual representation of an iterated function on the complex plane!

Him: Your dog's face exceeds 10 billion solar masses, the maximum weight for a black hole!

Me: Your sister's cat exceeds the Chandrasekhar limit!

Him: That's planck-length-scale compared to your uncle's monkey.

Me: Yeah well that's because it's a collapsed superposition of your father's worm.

Him: Collapsed superposition? *loses*


Sachi

We Can't Do That

Last Friday, I thought I was all on schedule for applying with early action to the University of Chicago. Then, I noticed an old paper in a stack on my desk. I glanced at it, and saw to my horror that I was supposed to have turned in a request for senior packet form (the senior packet is the transcript plus a lot of unnecessary stuff), along with an unusually shaped envelope, three dollars, and a secondary school report form, to the records office two weeks before the application deadline. That was the previous Friday! Well, there was nothing that I could do at that point, but prepare all of those things (it was not easy to find the kind of envelope that they asked for) and bring them in on Monday. This morning before school started, I walked into the records office with my forms and envelope and money, and asked the woman behind the desk if they could process my request for senior packet in less than one week. I told her that it was due on October 17.

She was shocked. "No, we can't do that," she replied with a look of disgust. I persisted, and she asked me whether I had given my other things to my counselor, such as my senior information sheet. I told her that I had, and she said that she could say that there was a rush, but that it was nevertheless impossible to process my forms with such little notice. In the end, she asked for my form, which I handed to her.

"Wait," she said, "this says that the deadline is November 1."

"Yes," I responded. "But the deadline for the records office was two weeks earlier than the college deadline."

"Oh," she said, "I thought you meant that the college deadline was October 17. That's no problem. By all means, we can process your forms." So my strange encounter ended in relief.


-Philip

I F-ing Hate Facebook... which almost alliterates!

So I'm doing a photo project on girls and the loss of innocence, which is actually way less sketchy than it sounds. I need a bunch of teenage girls looking confused or dressing sluttily for it. Shouldn't be a problem considering I'm a teenage girl with friends (I hope) right? Wrong. Apparently, high school sucks and teachers pile on way too much work. Nonetheless, I sent out several desperate messages via Facebook hoping somebody, anybody, would take pity on me.

And then I get a Facebook notification. I was all hoping it was somebody replying to my desperate pleas for help. Instead, it says "Your desiribility rating has changed again on Sparkey! Click to see how desirable you are now!"

Why me?

<3 Helen

Does Anybody Have Serious Objections?

Ah, the SFA, the province of so many strange people like myself (yes, Sachi, I am aware that I am using your first sentence template). The SFA consists of twelve students, ten teachers, a housemaster, and a department head all sitting around a large table in the library early in the morning. The principal is there, so is a Newtonite reporter, a secretary, and other people watching from the sidelines. The leader of the SFA remarked that we should try to start as close to 7:00 as possible. "We could discuss start times and end times in the future if we want..." First comes the Principal's Report. The principal apologized for not being present at the first meeting last week: "The truth is that I completely forgot about it. That's all I can say...It was a real embarrassment." I didn't mind, because I had been unaware that that meeting existed until I read about it in the Newtonite two days later. The Principal's Report was about the state of the building project. The state of the building project was strong. "I'm sure you are all impressed by the progress of the building rising from the ashes," the principal said, "or maybe I should say, rising from the asbestos." Nobody laughed. The SFA is a very serious place. Someone suggested that we discuss the problem of the lack of freshman representatives. Ideas were proposed. People also questioned the constitutionality of special elections. Yes, there is an official SFA constitution (we wound up discussing its validity later in the meeting, and about revising it and ratifying it, all with official formal procedure, of course). Jared suggested making a poster to publicize the SFA to ignorant freshman. Someone else suggested making Wednesday announcements about it. A teacher said that he was sure that spending more time in SOS would solve the problem. Since I hate SOS, I thought it would be best to avoid using it as a solution. I proposed creating a bulletin board that would tell what was happening in the SFA on a weekly basis to attract interest. "Would anyone like to organize this poster?" asked the head teacher representative. Jared and I raised our hands.

At some point the main teacher representative said something about formally deciding not to have to formally decide things. Hmmm. Sounds appealing.

"Perhaps we should discuss possible topics to be addressed in future meetings," someone proposed. A boy near me suggested rethinking the weighted GPA. Someone raised his hand. "I propose that we break into the subcommittees that we created last year." There was some discussion about this. The general consensus was that the subcommittees were a good idea.

Later that morning, I had to go to an orthodontist appointment which was preparation for my braces to be removed. An assistant with a Spanish accent was plying some braces off of my teeth when suddenly she came upon a tooth that didn't obey. I felt pliers grabbing and pulling and grabbing and pulling my tooth this way and that. "Dr. M-----!" she called out, "I need help!" At some point, they had to make molds of my teeth. The assistant came messy with blue stuff all over her gloves, mask, and face. "Open," she said, and plopped a glob of sticky blue stuff into my mouth. "Stick your tongue," she said in her accent, "Stick your tongue. Stick, stick, stick." Oh, I realized, she wanted me to stick out my tongue. I tried. Still, she continued saying, "Stick your tongue." I suppose my tongue must not be flexible enough for her liking. When this was done, she tied all kinds of wires around my teeth. Meanwhile, a man came into the room and began to set up a camera. The orthodontist came over to me when I was about ready to leave and said, "If you stay longer, you can be on TV! Ha, ha, ha..." No, I do not want to stay longer, and no, I do not want to be on TV, I thought.

-Philip

Fun with Economics

I kind of live at MIT on the weekends. They offer classes for high schoolers through a bunch of different programs. On Sundays I take AP Economics at Delve, their AP program. My microeconomics teacher is one of the directors of the program. We started to talk about public and private goods.

"A public good is one that is non-rival; it doesn't cost anything to let another person use a road. Public goods are also non-exclusive. Like national defense. You can't protect everyone but one person in the middle of the country. Don't attack us, just him!" My teacher/the director explains.

"What about non-profits?" A student asks.

"Non-profits. I don't know. I actually hate non-profits. They just don't work. They're so inefficient. They don't have any competition so they can just overpay their bureaucracy and spend money unwisely and still survive," the teacher/director rants.

"Isn't Delve a non-profit?" Someone points out.

"Well...yeah." She admits.

Later on we were talking about the 'free rider problem' which is where people benefit from other people doing/paying for something without having to pay for it themselves. Like, it helps me if most other people get a flu shot, and then I don't even have to pay for it. Pointing out other examples, the micro teacher says, "If every other house on your street has an alarm system, a robber couldn't guess which houses don't, so it might not be worth it to rob the street, and a bunch of people are getting free rides."

I comment, "Unless it was literally every other house. Then you could just go down the street robbing every other one."

Another student responds, "Yeah, but you'd be pretty easy to catch."

I respond, "Well you wouldn't just go 1, 3, 5, 7...you'd have to go 1, 27, 7, 11..."

At the end of class we switched to macroeconomics. The macro teacher was talking about the Fed.

"The Fed. Isn't that such a cool name?" I half tune out as he is talking. All of a sudden I hear, "The Fed sells bombs."

"What?!" I exclaim, looking at my micro teacher.

"Wait, what?" My micro teacher asks the macro teacher.

"The Fed sells bombs," my macro teacher says.

"Oooh," my micro teacher says. She looks at me. "He said the Fed sells bonds, not bombs," she says and fingerspells bonds.


Sachi

When parents get together....

So my parents had a meeting/dinner/get together thing tonight. And a bunch of us teens/kids ended up in my study either doing homework or procrastinating on homework. After dinner, the homework sort of died, and one of my friends (who's a few years younger than me) told us a little anecdote about how the boys in her school buy Five gum (Fire king I think?) and peel off the shiny part and....
Stick it on their fingers! Like nail polish! Except not...

Well, I thought it was funny....

(Btw, tklalmighty, you went to this school)

~'Cilla

Envelopes, envelopes everywhere

Applying to college requires a lot of work--especially paperwork.  Luckily, with modern conveniences like the internet, much of that paperwork is no longer on paper, and with an amazing invention called the Common Application, you can apply to member colleges with the same application, all on the internet.  But even in this age of conveniences, sometimes we still have to take out a pen and write on paper.  Yesterday I was preparing teacher recommendation forms and the envelopes for them to be sent in, and I soon found the work to be tedious.  It was a beautiful afternoon, and I was sitting on the porch with Rebecca and Sachi, who were researching astronomy for their astrobiology class.  Seeing me writing my teacher's name and the school's address repeatedly on the envelopes with so many more to do, Sachi pittied my situation and offered to do some for me.  I consented.  But perhaps this was not such a good idea.  At one point, Sachi misspelled the teacher's name.  We discussed using white-out, but ended up with the decision to tape a piece of paper on top and re-write it there.  Sachi scolded me for talking to her while she was writing, and for awhile after that we wrote in silence.  At some point, I was talking, and then I noticed that I had misspelled the name.  Luckily, this one was easy to fix just by writing over it.  Soon the work was done, and I put the envelopes on my desk and enjoyed the afternoon.  But later, when I was writing the college's addresses on the envelopes, I noticed that something was wrong: Sachi had written one of the return addresses upside-down!  Harumph.  Some people just don't know how to write return addresses.  (Don't worry, I'm not actually angry at you, Sachi, and I thank you for your help).  I don't think a college would be very impressed by someone who writes upside down, so I got another envelope and did it again.  

-Philip

How many licks does it take to get to the center of Mars?

On weekends, Rebecca and I take an astrobiology course at MIT, with one of my favorite people teaching it, Zandra. We always manage to have a blast and say completely ridiculous things.

Last class we started off by reviewing the processes in a cell, and watching a realtime youtube video of a simulation—unfortunately, we didn't have any speakers and no one could hear it. "Will you do sound effects?" someone asked. "Thhht, thhht, thhht," Zandra starts off making the clicking sound for unraveling the DNA. "Thht, tht,tht, th....FWOOM! ch-ch-ch-ch-ch....wait I want to save that one for later! Shoooooooooom....shhhhhshhhshhhhshhh, kapaka FWIT! FDOOM"....All the while we are laughing hysterically. "I better stop before I embarrass myself," Zandra says after it was too late.

Then we moved on to astronomy slides. "If for some reason you've never heard of Mars, it's the fourth planet from the sun," Zandra begins...then goes into complex chemistry. "I thought Mars was made of aluminum oxide," one student asks. "If Mars is made of aluminum oxide, then by just adding iron you could get thermite!" I say excitedly, thinking of an entire planet of thermite. "Thermite burns at a temperature of over 2,000 degrees celsius and drips molten iron." Of course, after that no one wanted to let me near Mars.

As we continue we hear a strange noise from outside. As we theorize what it is, someone pipes up, "It's a robot dog laughing at your theories." Another student hypothesizes, "It's the delayed sound effects for the bio video."

Zandra then introduces our projects to design a solar system. "Pick a star and name it. You can name it after some real star, or you could name it Schmeed. I always wanted a star named Schmeed." She calls on someone to read a slide. "I choose..." she says, thinking. "Pikachu!" someone exclaims.

Then Zandra goes into more math about luminosity. "The energy at infinity is zero....and I'm so sorry I just said that." Moving on from this very strange statement, she talks about how we need to "Calculate the velocicery....I mean the necessary velocity." I think we should coin the word velocicery, personally, it's a very useful hybrid.

Finally, we conclude with a video. Zandra's laptop is always almost out of battery. Today, we once again warn her. "Your battery is out." "It's not gone, yet," she protests. "It had a little x over it," a student points out. "That doesn't mean it's out, it just means it doesn't like me," Zandra argues. Two seconds later the screen says 'Preparing to hibernate,' then goes black. Mhm.

And that's how many strange things can happen in less than two hours. :)


Sachi

Harvard Sq: Land of Tourists and Creepsters

So, yeah, I haven't blogged in awhile. I totally meant to, but then school and well, life, got in the way. Whee, didn't I just sound so deep?

So anyway, I saw a movie tonight with a few friends (Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist- totally funny and worth watching!) Pretty harmless and awkward-free, right? Apparently not when you're us.

After the movie, we waited for about half and hour for my friend's mom to pick us up. At night. In Harvard Sq. With sketchy people. We were a bit hyper, ok, a lot hyper, and doing some seriously strange things. One time we were doing this little dance/boppy thing, and this random middle-aged guy goes "Dancing is good! Keep on dancing!" Then later, another guy stops and goes "That's not allowed here," and we look at each other a little worried that he's serious, when he continues "No laughing here!" Creep.

Then this car of older guys (collegeish) drove by and asked how old we were. So naturally, I bluntly stated we were *15* and told him to move on. =D

<3 Helen

I Don't Have a Cat

I take sign language with Sachi at school. It's very fun, but like any language, it's easy to get confused when you're a beginner. Today, we were asking questions off index cards to each other and answering them, in sign of course. One girl in the class asked another "Do you have a cat?" and the answerer responded "no". Then the teacher started to ask the cat-less girl something else, but I didn't really catch what, because the girl knew a lot of signs already so they were talking in vocabulary too advanced for me. We were just watching their conversation and not understanding most of it, when suddenly the teacher leans backwards with her hands in a claw shape and makes a cat-like hissing sound. "Oh my god!" exclaimed one person in the class, voicing all of our surprise. She, Sachi, and I looked at each other. "I totally missed what that was," said Sachi. Finally, they ended the conversation as the teacher says, "Kiki! That's a cute name for a fish!"

"Wait, I thought they were talking about cats!"

-Rebecca

-A != A-

One thing I've noticed about English teachers is that they usually hate math. They hated it when they took it in school, and have never used it since. Which is fine, I guess, if you're teaching English, but when they start to calculate students' grades it becomes evident. I think they should teach a class Math for Grading 101. I would volunteer to teach, actually.

A few days ago in English we had to write 'seven carat diamond paragraphs', which is a paragraph where you have a simple sentence, then a compound, then complex, then compound complex, then complex, then compound, then simple. We were writing these paragraphs about a story in the book, but I was mostly focused on the grammar and not what I was writing.

When she handed the paragraphs back today, I noted with surprise I had gotten a 54. Looking over the paper, I realized she had deducted 2 points for every past tense verb I used (since we are not supposed to write about books in the past tense). I had put the entire thing in the past tense. I conferred with my friend—my friend had written more verbs, and put all of them in the past tense, so she had received a 34. This made no sense, and was really a lottery of how many verbs you had written. If one was doing it sensibly, it would be a certain amount of points for speaking in all past tense, and half those points for using past tense half the time, etc.

Now this was just the beginning of the strange grading—she had made her grading system such that one could receive negative points on the assignment! I was so tempted to hand in the rewrite written in a fashion that would earn me a negative value, and thus pointing out the ridiculousness of the grading system. She had graded them by first saying how many of the seven sentences you had done grammatically correct—I had 6/7, giving me an 86, then taken whatever other points you lose off that number, so she took 32 points off for my 16 past tense verbs. If I had just made all of the sentences wrong, I could have gotten
-32 points!

I wonder what letter grade you get when you get negative points. Perhaps grades work on a modular scale—if you go below an F you get an A, but undershoot too much and you get a B. Or if you get over a hundred you get an F. That would be amusing. (Also, if you get the title reference, kudos to you.)


Sachi

Interesting Observation of the Debate....

So I decided to watch parts of the Vice President that is going on...right now in fact. It's very interesting.
But politics aside, my dad and I noticed a curious thing while Palin and Biden were talking:

(On average of like a minute or something) Palin blinks roughly once a second while Biden blinks only once every 2.3 seconds.
Whatever it stands for, it was rather fun counting how many times they blinked.

~'Cilla

Eating the Elephant

We had senior seminars last week, in which we listen to our counselors talk about all of the exciting steps in the process of applying to college.  You know how counselors like to use cliche metaphors to give their students advice.  My counselor asked, "How do you eat an elephant?"  Someone muttered, "Bite by bite."  "Yes," my counselor said, "You eat an elephant one bite at a time."  I thought to myself, is there anything that you don't eat one bite at a time?  

Counselor meetings can get boring, even for an attentive student like me.  I found my eyes wandering around the room, which by the way, was shaped like a tall slice of pie.  I happened to discover a bookcase, which held books presumably used by the counselor.  They had titles like Normal Adolescence, Parent and Teenager, Families of Today, The Art of Child Discipline, or something like that.  I suppose those books might come in handy if the counselor ever had a severe case to settle.

Speaking of elephants, I would like to tell some stories about my really strange gym class.  At the beginning of the school year, I had no gym class.  My counselor then put me into a class called Personal and Group Awareness (PGA), which was the only gym class that could fit into my schedule.  The activities have ranged from the standard team-building activities (like the human knot) to the absurd and highly awkward.  For example, we have an activity called polar response.  To do this, the teacher draws a line on the blackboard (this is in M19, in case you hadn't figured it out) with opposite answers on the ends.  In the middle is a big X.  Then, he will tell a scenario.  Depending on how he/she would respond, each student goes up to the board and writes his/her initials somewhere on the continuum.  The only rule is that you can't put your initials in the middle (the X)--you have to pick a side.  Here are some of the scenarios that we have had: suppose you would be given one million dollars if you don't shower, brush you teeth, or clean yourself in any way for six months.  Would you do it?  If you could make a person cease to exist just by thinking "bye bye" and the person's name, would you use the power?  If you saw someone pulling a fire alarm, would you report it?  Through these activities, I have come up with one conclusion: the world is full of level-one people.  If you don't know what that means, look up Dabrowski, or ask Sachi about it.  Basically, it means that you're self-centered.

Another amusing aspect of PGA is people who arrive late.  The class is in A block, and there are bound to be some late-comers.  My gym teacher makes a big deal about how it is important for the Group that everyone arrive on time.  So when class begins, he shouts, "I'm locking up!" and locks the door.  Anyone who comes late has to knock, making a big disruption to the class, and answer the teacher's questions: "Why are you late?"  "I was sleeping."  "That's not a good excuse.  Class, should we let her in?"

Now, for the elephants that I alluded to before, and then forgot to tell about.  Today, the teacher said "You find yourself on an island....You are being chased by ravenous, wild, rabid elephants....You have to find a way off of the island."  Apparently, the way off of the island was to find your way to the other side of a cave.  A boy sitting near me mused, "how do you get off of an island through a cave?"

-Philip