I feel like I'm approaching this stupidly, so if you have any ideas, I would be grateful. Hints that trivialize the problem are not welcome.

The integers 1 to n listed in order. A swap is a switching of any two elements in the list. Prove that any sequence of swaps that takes the original list to itself contains an even number of swaps.

"Happiness is a choice."

Splash!

So in all fairness, I really don't have a right to post on this. Initially I intended to be really involved, but things turned out a little differently than expected. So while this covers my experience in some detail, the real post on Splash belongs to Jessica. I'd suggest you pester her to actually make this post (especially given that she hasn't posted in so long I think we've all stopped yelling at her for it).

The Event

A brief description of Splash before I begin: Splash is a two day program run by the Educational Studies Program (ESP) here. During Splash, individuals (mostly college students at MIT, though all three of those descriptors (college, student, MIT) are violated every year) sign up to teach classes for middle and high school students. This would be fairly fun as described, but the kicker is: teachers can register any class they want. Anything at all.

So obviously we end up with a lot of "interesting" classes. I actually have no idea if we even have a form of quality control (I'm pretty sure we don't, since at no point did anyone check in with me or my coteacher to review what we were gonna do). Nonetheless, the general atmosphere of the event is pretty exciting, both for teachers and students. For a list of the classes, go to http://esp.mit.edu/learn/Splash/2009/catalog/.

Just like with HMNT, there was a huge preparation phase. Unlike with HMNT, I wasn't involved with it. I'll get to why later, but for now I'll just talk briefly about my class and my admin-y job (which was horribly executed >_>).

Back up a few weeks, maybe a few months, I forget. It was 11:30 PM, 30 minutes before the deadline to register a Splash class. I have some ideas floating around, but I haven't really gotten my thoughts together and come up with a solid class plan. I walk into my neighbor's room to tell him to register a class before the deadline (yes, I recognize the hypocrisy). We sit there for a while discussing class ideas, and as the registration deadline nears, we make a decision: we're going to team-teach a class on Bridge.

Ok, go ahead. Laugh. No, I don't know conventions to save my life, and neither did he, but hey, it would be fun, and we needed to learn at some point anyway. So we registered the class, I tucked my other ideas away for another year, and we went back to psetting.

Fast forward to yesterday night. Realizing that we had done absolutely no preparation (including learning conventions) for our class, we decided to get to work. I got back from doing my admin job for Splash at 10:30, and we set out to find and buy decks of cards. It was a difficult search, but eventually we returned with four decks. We sat down and, despite many distractions, we finally pulled together a basic lesson plan by 2 AM. We ended up not learning conventions, and so we only included the basic opening and first response conventions. Two hours later, I went to sleep, slightly pumped for Splash the next day.

And finally we're here. The day of Splash. I wake up at 11, which is fairly characteristic of me on all days absent a roommate telling me to go to class. I realize my class is in an hour and panickedly run to shower. We leave for teacher check in at 11:40 and then go to our classroom. Surprisingly, the class went pretty well. The kids seemed cool, we pretended we knew what we were talking about, and they played some bridge. I won't lie, watching them play was a pretty big morale booster for me. Then the class ended and, minus the free meals and the admin work that I'll describe in a moment, that was Splash for me.

My admin job was to organize food for the kids coming here to take classes. Turns out I procrastinate. Because of this, this fairly simple task caused a decent bit of stress to ESP. It worked out in the end (or probably will, we'll wait to see how lunch tomorrow goes), but I'm not proud of how I handled it. I ended up buying Dominos Pizza for lunch both days and Qdoba for dinner today. I can now say that I have spent several thousands of dollar on food in college.

Edit: One day, we had to go to a general teacher training session (they just told us about logistics pretty much). On this day, Ved woke me up (he thought I might be doing CPC). There, credit awarded =P.

Thoughts

Splash was fun. I enjoyed my class, and overall the event is pretty cool, but to be honest, my participation was not very high. So why did I choose to post on Splash? Because it's a really cool idea, and one that I would be very sad to see die. So why didn't I participate? Well, frankly, because admin work is not what I joined for. I joined because I like teaching, and I like the idea of everyone teaching. But admin work is not related to teaching at all. Now, admin work is necessary obviously, and I certainly helped out as much as I could for HMNT. I feel that HMNT's prep work was more structured and well defined, but at some level I suspect that I might just have been more invested in personally seeing HMNT come through. Either way, in the future I'm gonna focus more on teaching more and better classes.

Final Notes

ESP runs a lot of programs like Splash, and in my opinion this kind of a service is pretty valuable for the local community. Because of this, ESP has been spreading to other schools. In particular, UChicago, Duke, and Stanford have functioning ESPs, and Harvard is currently trying to set one up. If you go to one of these schools, you should look into ESP, if not to help out, then to teach. Even if you don't go to a school with ESP already set up, get a group of kids together who are interested in running something like this and let me know. There's a company called Learning Unlimited, founded by ESP alums, that provides initial funds and supplies (most notably websites) for new ESPs.

Here's to another long posting draught!

~jnub

HMNT

This space reserved for a post on hmnt, from the activities fair in august to the contest yesterday. It's worthwhile to note that in some sense, this is an anniversary, since this blog opened with a post on HMMT last year. Time passes quickly on long and short scales. In other news, goddamn orgo test tomm >_>

_______________________________________________________________________

Twas a junking August day, in the year 2009. All the freshmen were flooding the gates of the athletic center on their way to the activities fair. I got in and did the most obvious thing: got a free bag and started loading it with the freebies from all the clubs (anecdotally, most of the freebies I still have hidden in various nooks and crannies in my room). However, I was also aware of which clubs I would definitely take up, which I would definitely avoid (top of this list, anyone? =P), and which ones I might consider as the year went by. And so it happened that Jessica and I reached the non-descript booth next to the Undergraduate Math Association table. The booth was manned by Jacob and other people, and was devoted, as you will undoubtedly be shocked to hear, to promoting HMMT and getting people on the mailing list. In the course of the conversation with Jacob, he asked, "Would you guys be interested in organizing the problem writing for HMNT" or something along those lines.

Perhaps HMNT needs a brief introduction. HMNT, or the Harvard-MIT November Tournament, is HMMT for local Boston school kids. These kids have had little to no experience with math contests, and so this sets the dynamic of HMNT apart from HMMT in a couple of significant ways.

In any case, caught up in the euphoria of being silly frosh and our gradeless state of Pass/No Record, we said that sure, we could do that. Then we moved on through the rest of the fair and went back to Baker.

A couple of days later, we get a somewhat official looking email from Jacob letting us know what exactly we had tentatively accepted. Apparently we were to be the "Problem Czars" for HMNT, and it was our job to actually get the contests written and populated with appropriate problems. Now, being somewhat lazy from second sem senior year and being fully aware of how long it takes to write problems (or get them written), I was wary of continuing, but Jessica insisted that we continue, and so we accepted the position.

Fast forward several weeks of problem sessions. Due to Jacob and Shaunak's checking up on us, we had made sure to keep good track of the problems we had been received from these sessions that could potentially be used for HMNT. Coming into mid-October, we announced that we had enough problems to put together the rounds. This was good, since if we had waited any later, apparently things would have been not so great. We spend a stressful weekend texing up problems, editing mistakes we notice, and putting together what we think is an acceptable contest.

We release the four rounds for proofreading, and within two days we get a response: the problems suck, no joke. Not all of them, sure, but there are way too many problems that are either too hard or too easy, most of them aren't "interesting" (at this point, we really had no idea what that meant), and pretty much all the ones that work need to be revised in one way or another. This was fairly disappointing, though I will admit I had suspected that our problems were not so great >_>. Thus began the massive overhaul phase of this event. Jacob and Shaunak initially took over writing the Guts Round, leaving us the General, Theme, and Team Rounds. However, due to our general inability to recognize/write good problems fast enough, we were eventually left with full responsibility only for the Team Round. We finished this and helped out as much as we could with the other rounds. This whole spectacle took us around 3 weeks of hardcore work and, for me at least, staying up till 4:30 every morning.

Finally, everything is written and ready. We spend the last few days before the contest printing everything, collating stuff, and making sure that everything is all set up. Finally, it's the night before the contest. We've just wrapped up everything, and I'm running over to Baker at 10:30 so I can meet up with friends to watch Star Wars Ep 6. We finish this at around 1 in the morning, and I get to sleep.

The day of the contest arrives. I wake at 4, get ready, and am at Random at 5. We spend the next two or three hours moving random boxes with contests, free stuff, and oh so many bags of goddamn juice from Random to Lobbies 10 and 13, i.e. the place where you register and the place where you eat during HMMT respectively. After this, I'm told to go print out as many copies of guts solutions as I can. This is intermittent task and throughout the day I successfully retrieve maybe 100 copies total. At 9 I go to one of the two test rooms to proctor the General and Theme rounds. I read the little "Welcome to MIT...." speech and, despite my horrible timing skills, we manage to administer these tests alright. Then that's over, I watch the kids scramble to find their proctors for the team round, and then I head back out to go do more guts printing. At some point, Lily calls me and I go over to Stata to help with lunch. I eat lunch, do more printing, and then head over to the Guts Round. Despite not knowing the teams, this was decently fun. I decided to run rapidly up and down the aisles holding an answer sheet (sometimes after actually doing the problems) so as to scare the teams into thinking that some other team was doing absurdly well =P. Unfortunately, Jacob stopped giving me answer sheets after a while. The tournament wrapped up, and as all the kids left, I stood outside the guts auditorium and sold hmmt shirts (we almost sold out!). Then, following cleanup, we had a meeting and talked for a while, and then we all went back to our dorms. By this point it's around 10, so I get back to my room, talk to my neighbor and roommate for a while, plop down on the couch, and I'm out for the night.

Not quite the HMMT I remember, but as always, some things change and some things don't.

~jnub

Oh crap

I just realized that the character "Moist" from Dr Horrible is in fact Howard Wallowitz. What a pro.

In other news, I have a 6 page paper due at 11 today. I have a para of it done >_>

This initially began as a response to Brian's latest post on education: http://adeadhamster.blogspot.com/2009/10/information-is-not-knowledge.html

However, it overflowed so here it is:

____________________________________________________________________________________

The post discusses incorrect learning, not lack of motivation, so we'll stick with the premise that people can be motivated. Given this, is your problem primarily that people aren't stopping to examine their learning more deeply? Certainly this would make their experience more worthwhile. However, I feel that the issue is even simpler than this. Perhaps I'm not qualified to comment (after all, those faulty red moppers are certifiably better than me =P), but it seems that its misconception about what needs to be learned in the first place. Here's an example: in complex, Dr Osborne would have test reviews, and during the reviews, the most common questions was "Are there gonna be proofs? What proofs might be on there?" and he would tell us, and most of the class would go home and memorize the damn proofs. So it's no surprise that when you ask a student to prove the thing a month later, they can't do it. People don't understand that they're supposed to be learning different approaches to proving certain kinds of results and, more generally and more usefully, how to think about different problems. You might think that massive proof based classes in college cure this. False. For the most part, what happens is a few students who like math and have grasped the concepts do the problems and explain the proofs to the others, who write the proofs down, are told what proofs are on the tests, and never take a math class again. The kids who continue to take math are those who have grasped the concepts anyway, so effectively the problem hasn't been cut down at all. In fact, the problem here in particular seems 10 times worse than at TJ. The problem is most visible in math, but it's actually present everywhere. The kind of thinking we need in doing math is in fact the kind of thinking that creates progress in all fields, and yet only in math and physics is there even an attempt being made to promote it.

All in all, I feel that while this is a huge problem, it's not all that hard to tackle. However, this post has gone on for a while, so I'll stop now and finish my HUM paper (whatever MIT might call these terrible classes, certain things don't change in my book =P).

~jnub

It's hard to express how at peace I am with the world right now. The reason for this, however, is much more tangible:

My laptop screen is finally fixed!

I didn't realize just how much of a pain depending on the external monitor was until just now. It feels so good to look straight and not have to try and guess which field the cursor is in when I forget to plug in the external monitor. Also, now I have the option to dual screen =P.

Yea this is pretty content devoid, but that's ok. There's actual stuff which I'll fill in tonight.

Life

This previous Saturday, my roommate Ray decided to clean out his frog tank. The occupant of the tank, one Gordon, had been purchased at the start of term. He was our constant companion in all endeavors, and better still, he looked like a cartoon frog.

With our assistance, Ray poured out the water and frog from his tank into a plastic cup and then set about cleaning the tank. As he was cleaning, Gordon, in a stroke of inspiration, realized that there was no longer a ceiling above his head. The sky was the limit, and he was going to reach for that. With amazing strength, he leaped out of the cup and landed.......

on the floor. At this point, Gordon goes, "Shit. I am an aquatic frog." Gordon begins hopping feebly across the floor as his lung thingies dry out. Luckily, we notice his escape and deliver him back to the cup. Ray fills the tank quickly with tap water and puts Gordon back in.

It was too late. Gordon had had a taste of freedom and, despite (or maybe because of) the deoxygenation he must have suffered the first time, Gordon was intent on escaping. He swam repeatedly to the top of the tank, every time being pushed back by the cold, hard ceiling. Finally, in a fit of exhaustion, Gordon drifted slowly to the bottom of the tank, never to rise again.

Gordon's passing was a sad moment for all of us, and we felt we had to give him a proper goodbye. My roommates, my neighbors and I headed off with Gordon to the nearby bathrooms for the funeral service. However, when we saw that the bathrooms were occupied, we spontaneously decided to run to the Charles River. There, from atop the bridge, we spoke solemn words over Gordon's body and poured it into the Charles.

It's been a while

I apologize for the long break. A lot's happened since I last posted, too much to cover really, so I'm gonna post about a talk I went to yesterday. It was pretty informative and I enjoyed it a decent bit.

The speaker was an economist working with Ernst and Young (a trading company I believe). He was involved with writing the Global Biotechnology Report, an annual report on the state of the Biotech Industry. The talk was supposed to be on how biotech was being/going to be affected by the current recession. The answer to this, however, was fairly simple: the average money available to biotech companies goes down, and companies cut operations to accommodate. What was a lot more interesting was his description of how these companies actually work.

Biotech companies may have some side operations, but the bulk of their work is in drug discovery. Discovery is applied broadly here, but in essence these companies are looking to put drugs into the market under their copyright. Biotech companies typically put out a whole lot of proposed new drug designs, but unfortunately, for every 5-10 thousand drugs proposed, only one actually makes it to the drug market. Of course, this means a lot of wasted money for these companies, but that's not in itself a big concern for anyone else. However, biotech companies do need to get this money from somewhere. They run as public companies, fueled by the investments of venture capitalists. I don't actually know econ, but my understanding is that the investors feed money to the companies, the companies get drugs onto the market, the current investors get really large dividends, the stock prices climb, and new investors get excited and invest, providing money for biotech companies to start the research cycle anew. The process for getting a drug from conception to market takes almost two decades, and so investors periodically withdraw and invest money depending on whether they get impatient or excited. Because of this, biotech companies usually know how to deal with cash problems, and so won't be too badly hit by the recession.

The interesting part of this talk came when they guy started talking about healthcare. It's worthwhile to note that in every country in the world except for the US, drug companies are required to sell drugs at very reasonable prices, and it is this that makes health care elsewhere so affordable in comparison. However, it would be really bad to enact the same policy in the US for this reason: biotech companies use those large profits to pay their stock holders' dividends, and so if these profits are cut, dividends are cut, excitement falls, and stock prices do not rise as quickly as needed, severely cutting off the investments that fuel R&D. If we were to force healthcare costs down in the US, we would be fine short term, but in a decade or so, production of new drugs would come to a grinding halt. Obviously this is a problem. As of now, the US is essentially footing the bill for healthcare around the world.

This is a pretty serious issue, seeing as we really do need affordable healthcare. I've been thinking about this a decent bit since the talk and I've talked to some of you about it, but I'm interested in what you all think (if you actually felt like reading a post about bio and business >_>). Is there a clean solution to the problem, and is it driven by government, business, or science?

Anyway, let me know what you think, and I promise that you'll be getting an actual post at least every other day from now on.

A Post on India is Due....

But you're getting a post on today instead.

I wake up and realize, woah, today's my last legit day at home. I go downstairs, and mom tells me to pack, so I go watch Friends Season 4. The last episode is epic, cause we get House as a special guest, with his British accent, and he acts just the way House is supposed to act. Anyway, around 3, I realize I have an hour to start and finish packing >_>

An hour later, I've somehow pulled everything together in time, and also managed to figure out the combination to my old gym lock (dont ask >_>)

We leave for Union station and get there in good time. We kill an hour eating at the Food court, and then I go board my train. Amtrak is pretty pro, they have lots of leg room, lots of empty seats, power outlets, and I need to check if they have wifi. Anyway, I chose two empty seats and plop down. So there's this Indian guy with family sitting across from me. He's got some kind of asian wife (she might actually be one of the more yellow Indians from the northeastern states) , and he's from Anchorage, Alaska. Due to some misunderstanding early in the conversation, he came to know me as Ram the Gujurati, and I was too embarassed to correct this impression. He talked to me for a while about random things, then I read stuff, and 2.5 hours later, I got off at Princeton Junction. I got picked up and taken to the house of friends. We ate, played ping pong for two hours, browsed random movies, and now I will be going to sleep.

(For the record, this is part of my plan to update regularly (perhaps with not as content filled posts) because I actually won't be seeing you guys daily anymore. You all should do the same >_>)

The Cake is a Lie.....

and so was my promise to update on my trip. In the interim, something I found amusing:

The next time you get a rejection letter from a hoped-for employer, just send them the following:

To Whom It May Concern:
Thank you for your letter of [date of the rejection letter]. After careful consideration, I regret to inform you that I am unable to accept your refusal to offer me employment at this time. This year I have been particularly fortunate in receiving an unusually large number of rejection letters. With such a varied and promising field of candidates, it is impossible for me to accept all refusals. Despite [Name of the Company]'s outstanding qualifications and previous experience in rejecting applicants, I find that your rejection does not meet with my needs at this time. Therefore, I will initiate employment with your firm immediately. I look forward to working with you. Best of luck in rejecting future candidates.
Sincerely,
[Your Name]

India Trip - London: Legit?

So my parents got home from work on Thursday (July 2) evening, and we headed out to Dulles Airport. We were even earlier than usual, I think, with something like five hours to kill before our flight. I was planning on getting some reading in before the flight, but my family decided to get food (my suggestion of waiting for free dinner on the flight were unceremoniously ignored). We weren't very efficient about this though, I think we ended up walking the length of the terminal some four times before finally deciding on a place to eat (I don't remember what it was), even though there were maps and directories of the terminal posted just about everywhere listing the shops in the terminal. It actually reminded me a lot of a mall, and I had the brilliant idea of playing CTF at Dulles someday.

Anyway, we got on our flight, and I decided not to sleep at all. I watched Dragonball Evolution (an ok movie, not one I'd recommend though), two episodes of Friends and the Office, and then random pieces of the other movies playing. The flight was like 8 PM to 4 AM US time, and England is something like 5 hours ahead, so by the time we got out of the airport, it was around 11 AM. At this point we encountered the Tube. For those who haven't been to Britain, this is actually pretty pro. It's London's extensive metro system, and there are stations pretty much everywhere, it's really hard to get stuck somewhere in London without a station within a quarter mile radius. Anyway, we bought tickets that let us use the Tube and the red double decker buses as much as we wanted for the next three days. We got on the tube and, in an hour and a half, with just one line transfer, we disembarked and walked to our hotel, which was pretty ideally situated very near all of London's tourist sites. Unfortunately, this was about the only thing ideal at the hotel. The people there were very nice of course, but the hotel itself was ridiculously spartan. There was no elevator and narrow staircases, which was pretty annoying for my dad who was recovering from a leg clot. When we reached our room, though, we were in for an even bigger surprise. We had one two person bed, two single beds, a decent bathroom, a TV, and two small cabinets. Sounds decent right (excepting the lack of phone)? Ah, but here's the trick: there's no ground space left. No joke, you cannot walk around here at all. You basically take off your shoes when you get in and jump from bed to bed. I had known beforehand that the Britain was not going to be as......well, lavish, as the US, but I really hadn't expected this. Don't get me wrong, the place was clean and well kept, it was just small. Next time we might try booking hotels a little further away from the city.

My dad's plan, as it happens, called for us to spend that whole day touristing, meaning that I was not to get any sleep until that British night (here I began to regret not sleeping on the plane >_>). We go out and stop at a Burger King for lunch (we were advised that Brit Burgers were somewhat better than the American equivalents). The food was alright, about the same as an American BK. While we were eating, this one boy came in begging and, when he didn't get anything, he left and his family, who had been waiting outside, came in begging as well. My father was kind of shocked at this, but apparently it's not uncommon in downtown London (where we were staying). After lunch, we set off, taking the metro down to Embankment, which is this scenic river crossing. On the opposite side, a bunch of random performers were doing their stuff for donations and it was very relaxing to walk along the shore like that. We passed the London eye and decided to come back when it was less crowded. We reached another bridge and crossed it, finding ourselves at Big Ben. We kept going, past Westminister, to this random square where people were protesting Iraq and Sri Lanka and stuff. We kept walking (around this time Dilip got irritated because we weren't "doing anything") and walked through trafalgar square and picadilly circus. Then we bought ice creams on the street (damn those were good) and took a bus to Hyde and Green Park. These were two really nice, adjacent parks with lakes and gardens and stuff in the middle of the city. We had a nice walk and eventually crossed the park, coming back to Bayeswater, where our hotel was. We then decided to catch a bus to go see Marble Arch. We get on the bus and it takes off. As it's doors open at the next stop, I see my dad getting out hurriedly. Confused, we run out to tell him that this isn't our stop, only to see my dad standing stunned on the roadside shouting "Thief" and this guy running away from him. I'm not entirely sure what went through my head at this point, but I ended up jumping off the bus and sprinting almost immediately after this guy, yelling at the top of my lungs, "YOU ASS". In retrospect, I probably should've shouted thief instead, but as I said, I wasn't really thinking. I don't remember much about this guy, except that he was of a fairly stocky build and Middle Eastern coloring. He wasn't particularly fast, and I was gaining on him, but he ended up running out across the street just before a truck crossed, and by the time I had gotten behind the truck, he had jumped a fence into Green Park and gotten away. Not sure if that was unfortunate or not though, since I have no idea whether or not he was armed (and I wasn't for sure). Anyway, I turned around to see my brother running towards me, in tears (just frightened, not hurt) and my mother running behind him. I started shouting to them in Tamil, saying that he got away, and a couple of Tamilian Muslims nearby stopped to talk to us. Anyway, my dad checked his stuff and found that he had everything. Apparently the guy had only taken my dad's wallet and, when he realized he was being pursued, chucked it (I didn't notice this for some reason, but somebody on the sidewalk found the wallet and gave it to my dad). This British girl, college age (she was really attractive too) came to talk to us about it, and she was really nice and told us where to report the incident and how we could catch the guy (all buses and trains have CCTV cameras, so police can track any crimes that occur on public transport. We set out for the Marble Arch and we reported the incident to the police there (my dad had this compulsion to "tell the story right", i.e. as a narrative instead of a crime report, so it was always funny to watch the officers listen to my dad for a minute or so before realizing he was reporting a crime). We looked around at the Arch for a while and then headed back to dinner, which we took with us to the hotel and ate.

The next day and the day after that were fairly straightforward. We saw most of the British tourist attractions, including the London Eye (big ferris wheel that goes really slowly and lets you see London), Madame Tussauds (Waxworks Museum, mainly to laugh at ridiculous hordes of people rushing to take pics with the various celebrities), Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace (I found out that my mom really hates royalty), Wimbledon (we didn't get to see any pro matches though), and some other stuff I don't remember atm. I just wanted to describe one thing though. On the last day, we decided to go to Greenwich for the lulz. We just went walking around and ended up sitting down on the grounds of the University of Greenwich. I realized just how much I needed sunny, open spaces after the cramped atmosphere in London, and so we spent a couple of hours there, just playing around with some of the college students in the massive park behind the school.

Now for my observations. First off, you can always distinguish British Girls from American (read: white) Girls (using facial features, though I haven't really thought about this enough to explain it). Second, these facial feature differences make British girls in general a lot more attractive than American girls.

More serious things now: the British are a lot more socialist and, in general, conscious of preservation than the Americans are. This said, the public settings (in London at least) also indicate a lack of common courtesies which Americans have come to expect. Free use of bathrooms in stores and free water at restaurants are two examples that come to mind immediately, but what I'm trying to say is this: In America, where we are all still, by and large, relatively conservative, we hesitate constantly to help people on a large, mass scale, but our actions indicate a personal touch, a care we show for the people we actually encounter. The British have a really good handle on the massive care, but, at least in London I feel, they've lost out a little on individual kindness. I suspect my thoughts are wrong actually, and that what I'm describing is actually the difference between city life and suburban life, but I'm not sure.

Anyway, London was interesting. I want to go back and visit Britain someday and stay somewhere outside of the city.

Our trip from London to India, and what happened there will be left for another day.

Back. And fairly tired. You'll prolly get your post tomorrow.

The extension will be till August. You will have a full account of my trip then.

I'm gonna ask for an extension on my due post. By ask I mean demand. If I get spammed, those responsible will pay >_>

Today ended up being more......interesting, I guess, than expected. I haven't slept for 44 hours or something, so I'm not writing a full entry now. In fact, I'm just gonna leave you in the dark. However, if I haven't posted a legitimate entry by Wednesday evening, please spam the hell out of this post (knowing that I receive an email for every comment made).

Happy Hunting!

Have reached England. Everything is old.

I'm leaving in about an hour and I probably won't be online again for another week or so. This is less because of internet availability and more because the damn power cord needs a converter and I'm too cheap to buy a British one. In the interest of laziness, Im gonna say don't expect any posts, at least till August.

Malls are so damn pro

Yesterday night we watched mall cop. I'm really bad at doing movie reviews, so I won't attempt one. Nonetheless, after playing CTF at Tysons, this movie just seemed so epic. That probably conveys nothing, but I'd recommend you watch the movie.

Grad + ANGP

I'll actually describe these sometime in the coming week. For now, though, a quote from Lily's car just as I was getting dropped off this morning.

Lily's dad has dropped off Ellen and takes a left turn, whereas my house is off to the right ish.

Lily: Dad, Arvind's here.

Lily's dad takes an alternate route.

Lily's Dad: Arvind is so big, Lily. How could I forget him?

Two hours ago, I was frantically filling out forms online, writing essays and panicking because I had to turn in all this stuff for college housing and advising by 5. I finished, and, after saving several confirmation pages, I went to eat an incredibly late lunch. I came back upstairs and noticed all these saved pages cluttering up my desktop and I decided to move them. I opened up my school folder and realized something: I should probably stop storing these files under Colleges in my Senior Year folder. I quietly went up a directory and moved my frosh, soph, jnr, and snr year folders into a new TJHSST folder before making a new College folder. I won't lie: it hurts.

Capture the Flag - So Legit

Take note, the title of this post is not sarcastic. Lily briefly described this, but I had a lot of fun with it, so I wanted to be more complete.

First a bit of history. Whether or not he admits it, this amazing idea was borne of Ved Basu. If asked, he will claim that he was joking, but this is a farce. We were trying to figure out how to spend the evening after the last day of school (suck it, juniors =P) on Wednesday. The initial suggestion was laser tag, which is undeniably fun. However, Ved said there was a lot more to do at Tysons Corner. He started throwing out suggestions, and we ended up talking about capture the flag - not outside, but inside the mall itself. It's kinda funny, but before we started playing this, everyone in our group was like, fail, this will not work, while everyone else whom I told this idea to was like, THATS SO PRO. Anyway, no one responded to the email thread about Wednesday evening, so on Tuesday night, we opened a group chat with me, Tim, and Ved to discuss what we were doing, eventually expanding to Eric and Dwang as well. The conversation was not incredibly on topic, though I dont think the participants would be very happy with me if I revealed the chat's contents =P. In any case, we finally worked out more or less all the details except for one: what would the flag be. Tim suggested rocks (no), I suggested flags. No one liked either of the suggestions, but we promised to bring in two flags and several rocks the next day.

Thus, after school had ended on Wednesday, we piled into several cars and drove to Tysons. Tim went to pick up Alice from Oakton and meet us at the mall. Eventually, we all arrived and began to argue about how to make the game work, while me, Ved, and Renjie at least were having really dumb "who can go the farthest in three steps" competitions. Eventually we decided on the rules of the game and set out for our bases. I stopped off at Nordstrom with Chris to give his mom his backpack, which took quite a while because we're both introverts who dont like to ask questions to employees >_>.

The rules of the game:

Tysons corner is shaped like an L. We situated the two bases at opposite ends of one branch of the L (note: this does not imply that the other branch can't be used for the game). We were allowed to use both floors of the mall. The teams were:

Team Tall (or not short):

Renjie You, Jack Wang, David Kim, Chris Olund, Eric Bomgardner, Arvind Thiagarajan

Team Short + Kee Young:

Tim Hu, Alice Yeh, Ved Basu, Lily Hsiang, David Wang, Luke Cheng, Kee Young Lee

Tall had their base outside of Bloomingdale's, while Short had their base outside of Macy's. Because we didnt want to get caught and thrown out by mall security immediately, we instituted the no-running (more correctly translated as no-getting-caught) rule. No man's land was this little strip between the two bases where escalators went up and down. Flags were located on the the upper floor, jails on the bottom floor. The game begins.

Let me describe a little bit of the strategy here. There are three ways to attack Tall Base:

1. Straight on, a direct line from the Short Base. This is likely to get you killed, but is also the easiest way to the flag if you can make it.

2. Descend to the lower floor, enter Bloomingdale's bottom floor by somehow tricking the jail guards of Tall, and go up the escalator there, then try to take the flag from behind. This usually works alright as long as you play the priorities of the jail guard against him. If he's trying to catch you, try to free teammates in jail (both you and they then get a free walk back to home base). If he's trying to guard the jail, then get into the store and head on up to the flag. Of course, everyone's got cellphones, so you have to get to the flag before the people below call the people above.

3. From the outside. There are actually two ways to do this: one entrance comes in from the side hallway outside of Bloomingdale's, and if planned properly allows for easy access from behind to either the flag or the jail. This is by far the best entrance. The other entrance is at the back of Bloomingdale's, but while it allowed for easy access to the jail, its access to the flag was heavily guarded.

There are also three ways to attack Short Base:

1. Straight on. Same deal as with Tall.

2. From below, this time through Macy's. Same deal as with Tall.

3. From the outside, there's again an entrance into Macy's directly, but this has the same flaw as for Tall Base, except now the flag is guarded much more securely. However, there are now two other entrances from the outside. One of them is too far up the hallway, so it really is the same as 1, but it provides for a nice escape route. The second one is all the way up the unused branch of the L. Nobody expected it to be used, and I dont think it was, but in future games, it's likely to be pretty epic.

I'm not gonna go through each game detail by detail, because that actually would get boring. First game I was on defense, our team as a whole played a mostly defensive game, putting half their team in jail. Ved was going to free them via attack route 2, and I noticed but, being an idiot, I waved to him for the lulz, so I was no able to catch him as he ran away through escape route 3 (back of shop).

Meanwhile, dkim waited until most of their team was trying to salvage their position, and then snuck across quickly, took the flag, ducked into a tea shop, drank some tea samples, and then walked leisurely back.

Second game, we decided to play more offensive a game, but Short was playing good defense, and basically all of us minus dkim and chris were in jail (maybe Eric too, I forget). Kee Young took our flag and they won.

Third game, I decided to take attack route three, via the outside edge of the L. However, as I started running along the path, I noticed Tim and Alice doing the same thing from their side. So I ducked behind a dumpster and waited for them. At one point, I jumped out to tag them and then realized that it was some random black man, who looked at me quizzically. I apologized and went back to hiding. God I must have looked sketchy >_>. In any case, I jailed them both and then stayed at the jail guarding them. Unfortunately, I then fell for the oldest trick ever, when Alice said "Hey Arvind, look over there" and then Kee Young freed them from the other direction. It was ok though, because while they walked back to their base, Eric got their flag and got back to ours. So in short, Team Tall was a winner =P.

Basically, we need to do this a lot more often, and next time with more widely spaced bases and with visible flags instead of putting your hand on your head to indicate possession of the flag. Twas epic.

I apologize in advance for this post. I try to avoid politics on here, somewhat because the politics I follow is politics most people don't care about at all. I've especially tried to avoid this topic, since our dear government does not sympathize, but I feel that I need to put this out there. My view is not an uncommon one, but I do think that in this case, its an unbiased one.

Today a war ended. A bloody civil war that most people did not follow or, frankly, care about. The war was fought in the North East sector of Sri Lanka by the Sri Lankan Government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eeelam (LTTE), also known as the Tamil Tigers. The Tamil Tigers are proscribed as a terrorist group in several countries, including the US. This is not entirely inaccurate, I concede. The Tigers are particularly harsh with their military, though of course, not being a recognized state, their military is treated as a terrorist organization.

Some background is needed to understand why this classification exists. Sri Lanka is home to two distinct populations: Sinhalese Buddhists and Tamilian Hindus. These two populations have little in common with each other, and the Tamilians, though numerous, are a definitive minority. The Sri Lankan Tamils have always been mistreated and persecuted to varying degrees, both by the Sinhalese and by mainland Indians. Hell, even one of India's celebrated epics (Ramayana) demonizes them. So when the British left Sri Lanka to self government, it was no big surprise that there were revolutionary movement fermenting in the Tamilian Northeast. One of these movements caught on and grew into the Tigers as they were recently. The Tigers were enormously successful at gathering support from Tamilians both in Sri Lanka and in India. They established a shadow government to administer proper justice to the Tamilians. The Sri Lankan government, concerned with its loss of power, sent troops into Tamil areas of the island. They were completely surprised when a LTTE military materialized and pushed them back out of Tamil lands. Sri Lanka retaliates by bombing the Tamils, eliciting protests from Indian Tamils. Indian Prime Minister finds his hand forced, and sends a peace keeping force (read: Indian troops) to quell the conflict in Lanka. Unfortunately, the Indian Minister ends up fighting on the losing side, i.e the Lankan government, enraging the Tamil Tigers. The Tigers had their agents in India assassinate the Indian Prime Minister. This resulted in the peace keeping force being withdrawn, the Tamil Tigers being marked terrorists, and an unofficial ceasefire between the two warring parties.

Many Sri Lankan Tamils had fled during this fighting, settling in different places around the world. Every time a number of these Tamils congregated, they set up charities for their fellow Tamils back home. While some of these were simply charities, a number of them contributed money covertly to the Tamil Tigers. With this money, the Tigers were able to maintain their military and develop their own minority state. The Tigers did not press for more land, but instead sought publicity for the cause of an independent nation for the Sri Lankan Tamils. The Sri Lankan government, powerless to wipe them out, sat idly by.

A little bit about what exactly the Tigers did. The Tigers set up an educational system and a justice system for the Tamils under their rule. They did not hold elections, they did not print currency, and they did not use military force to compel obedience from their people. They did not establish formal executive or legislative agencies, preferring instead to simply use local police forces. Nonetheless, despite this seeming crudity, the Sri Lankan Tamils openly preferred this system. The government offered them protection, rights, justice, and education. They might not have agreed with the governments methods of dealing with foreign adversity, but they accepted it. After all, they were an unrecognized people fighting against the world.

Then, in the last two years or so, the nations of the world began to systematically shut down Sri Lankan charities that they found. As the Tigers found their funds drying up, the Sri Lankan Prime Minister began anew the war that had ended so long ago. Without money to support their army, the Tigers began a futile stand against the Sri Lankan army, which was supplied by and modeled on the Chinese military. As the army slowly mowed down the Tigers and took their land, the Tigers continued to retreat. This morning, the leader of the Tigers was found dead after an ambush, and the war was declared over in the Sri Lankan capital. The UN, as it is wont to do, bleated uselessly about human rights and then sat on its ass. As a result of the war, several millions of Tamils have been displaced, either to other, less friendly parts of Sri Lanka, or to the Indian South, where an inept government mills about uselessly trying to provide the Tamils with sustenance.

I want to emphasize something: the Tamil Tigers constituted a dictatorship, and the source of their power, if one had to be chosen, was their military. And yet they were liked by those they ruled over, and they did not use the military to suppress their public's opinion. Do you realize just how rare this phenomenon is. A competent dictatorship that enjoys the unfettered support of its people. This amidst the completely incompetent democracies that riddle Southeast Asia. And yet it is this government that is labeled a terrorist organization, and it is to defeat this organization that so many misled governments in the world work.

The war is over, and within a month all discussion on Tamil rights will have ended. The Indians will make their customary gestures of condolence and then sit back again to enjoy their corruption. The Sri Lankan government will declare celebrations and then go back to its tourism supported economy. No one else really cares. It's just a little sad.

After avoiding this uncomfortable truth for a long time, I've come to a realization:

I have to watch Firefly if I want to understand the xkcds >_>

Today was the last full ARML. Not actually that sentimental, since there are what, 2 or 3 more mandatory practices? But even so, senior year is ending. Tis unfortunate.

On the car ride home, we created a story as a group, each of us providing a word in order. The resulting masterpeice is shown below:

A exotic mineral was consumed by five. These portable mushrooms were not luminescent, although they could, under certain circumstances, burn firewood. One silent cheesecake cracked open in five dragons, full of traffic lights and mushrooms. Poisonous pokemon attacked, voraciously, pure podcast doppler. Accidently, peanut butter jelly baptized pope through radiating cinderblocks. Flowers kicked toiletry among dancing statues rotting with glee. The moss provided sanctuary for digimon and flittering trolls so that stop sign would lose to the assassins game. Seventeen fails horrified Jared blinkers! Porky pig squeamish torbert "apparently they had complaints about five or something", Dkim huge nopper and wiretapping consistency filed complaints converging upon Bob Jones University. Haywood Woody Torrence screamed "a general is ugly, just like your mother". Suddenly rage warehouse ire proof came upon Tim. Small onions that smelled really good in terms of bio with respect to Williams college. Terrorists fenced John mailbox in forty six pine trees, unless they were too ugly for fiftyfive trashcans (read: Eric). Yes we can big bang so fat but low battery, not I said the cow, my foot is a huge large.

"We have only the one world. We have only the one hope." - Bean, Ender's Shadow

"You know, you kids are pretty dumb." - My Mom

You should watch the Namesake.

"Of course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn what not to do, and that's the end of you." - Richard Feynman

"Sickness and healing are in every heart; death and deliverance in every hand." - The Hegemon, Speaker for the Dead

"This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones we really believe, and those we never think to question." - Ender Wiggin, Speaker for the Dead

More Relevant

So I'm still more or less gonna keep away from talking about the actual trip, but this post (I feel) contains the most about the experience. The topic here is crowd racing.

So we should probably define this first. Wiki and Google are silent on the matter (maybe I'm using the wrong term), so I'll take a stab at it myself.

Crowd Racing: A race in which people try to move from source to sink as quickly as possibly, with the precondition that the space in between the source and the sink is filled with a moving crowd.

I was first introduced to crowd racing in middle school. Back then, we had silly block lunches or something, followed by half-period long activity blocks. This is actually pretty good planning on the school's part, but nvm that. To get to our activity rooms from the cafeteria, we'd have to walk down one of two hallways. However, both hallways would be filled with crowds of moving students, one group outbound and one group inbound. For those who have never tried this, it is actually very much fun. The first time Alex Gomes suggested I join their crowd race, I won handily. I was very happy and surprised until I realized that they had not raced, but had stood there laughing at me as I sprinted off. After that one trick, though, we would race back most days, and I still credit this habit with cutlivating my need to run randomly.

For a long time, crowd racing was just an amusement. Then we got to Disney World, and I realized that this was actually a very important skill to have. Amusement parks are known for their rides, but in reality you spend far more time getting from place to place than you do on the rides themselves, and if you don't know how to crowd race, this process takes 10 times longer.

Of course, the crowd racing involved is not conventional; there is one extra rule, and a couple of novel obstacles. The rule is this: not only do you have to move as fast as possible, you have to do this inconspicuously and with minimal disruption. This rule bothered me quite a bit. When I'm running through hallways or whatnot at school, I can jump out randomly to the side, as long as its timed right, and people will not be particularly surprised: they're used to eccentric people doing dumb things. But in public, you try that, and you will invariably have a little child randomly speed up and crash into you, wasting precious moments as the child's parent scolds you for being an idiot. In addition, even non-disruptive running is not satisfactory. I probably should've realized that randomly running is extremely suspicious, but its never mattered before. For instance, whenever I take a bus (whether from home or my lab or w/e) to a metro station, I always get down and start running into the station. I always wondered if someone would stop me and accuse me of theft, but no one ever did, so I figured it was ok. The kind officer at Disney had no such restraint >_>. My dad had just called me, telling me he had bought lunch (we were at Animal Kingdom) in Asia, but, because of the two trays and overflowing coke cup he was carrying, had taken a wrong turn and had no idea where he was or how to find us. I decided to run around and check all the places within a certain distance of the place he'd ordered food, but I was stopped soon after I started. The officer was rather suspicious, but since I only had my cell phone on me (and it was very obviously mine, it had a very recognizable picture for background), he let me go fairly quickly. So I could not run and I could not make random leaps into clearings.

Now for the obstacles. These pissed me off a good deal. These were: obnoxious little kids, strollers, wheelchairs, fat people. The little kids had no idea what they were doing, they'd just randomly get in the way, even if you were walking normally. They'd also make random sounds (like zoom, whoosh, etc.) and randomly hit their siblings while laughing. If I could convince them that I was running fast enough, though, they'd usually get out of the way. They were far more annoying while standing in line, but that's a story for later.

Wheelchairs I suppose can't be helped, but my god those things are annoying. They take up much more space than people, and there's really no room to maneuver around them, so they just completely destroy your ability to get wherever you wanna go. I wonder why the hell people who cannot walk come to amusement parks (can you really go on any of the fun rides?). So often I found myself wondering why the laws protecting disabled rights extend to things like amusement parks. (Note that I am not typically so openly insensitive, and this is not how I feel right now, but at the time, after a while in the sun and slow moving crowds, I was getting pretty fed up.)

Next we have the strollers. These were hindering for the same reasons as the wheelchairs mostly, but there was one other major factor. Half the strollers I saw had kids of age greater than 5. So I figure there's two options:

1. Your kid's under 5. In which case, (s)he's obviously not gonna enjoy Disney, why the five are you bringing them.
2. Your kid's over 5. In which case, your kid clearly doesn't need a stroller, they're just lazy, so tell them to get up and walk.

So yea, strollers just made me much more upset, because they're so daum.

And finally, the fat people. I suppose these were the most prevalent, but at least they were people, so I could maneuver around them fairly easily. I noticed something interesting actually. In my mind, there's supposed to be more fat guys than fat women, but here it was the reverse. I'm not sure why (I had that notion and why its the way it is).

So yea, now for what I actually picked up about crowd racing. The trick back in school has always been to move very fast and never stop moving. The same goes here, more or less, except that you want to choose a good starting speed and make more deliberate movements. You should never have to slow down, because you won't be speeding up again if you do.

Anyway, crowd racing is actually really fun and pretty useful too. I'd advise you all to try it sometime.

Least Relevant

A foreword: I'll be writing a number of entries about the last howmanyever days, and they will grow more and more relevant (I think). This post will be a very brief outline followed by random thoughts/anecdotes.

I got picked up near the end of math on Thursday, and we drove home to wait for our taxi. The taxi shows up, and we head for Dulles. However, the left turn light from fcpkwy onto the toll road is very ugly and broken. Our driver is very pro though. He pulls out of the leftmost of the two left lanes into the forward moving lane (cursing throughout at the complete daums who are sitting waiting for the broken light to work) and then takes a U turn back to turn onto the toll road. But here's the real pro part: the guy pulls out his cell, dials, talks to some road authority or someone about the problem, and by the time he hangs up, the light is fixed. That just blew my mind >_>

So then we check in and are waiting at the terminal, and my brother is like, let's get food. So we go get food, and because I am skinny, I was required to buy something as well >_> So I decided to try a cheese danish, and I was very surprised to find that the stuff in the middle is CHEESECAKE.

Moving on, we land at Orlando, my dad gets angry with the roads there or something, and we reach our hotel. Im kind of happy to see that we have a comp in the lobby with internet, so I go online and check the arml (wtf high score 4??? someone should show me the problems at some point).

The next day (friday), we go to epcot. Saturday is Universal Studios, Sunday Animal Kingdom, Monday Magic Kingdom, Today was Kennedy Space Center.

So my dad is very very cautious, and he will keep checking details, even when they are extremely obvious, until the relevant event occurs. So I think the most striking example of this was on Friday. We had had some difficulty getting to the park (btw, every morning we'd ask the people at the hotel counter for directions to the park we were going to, and everyday their directions got us onto park grounds but then were completely off), but we were finally driving up to the entrance. It looks like a large toll booth, and in big letters all over the top of the toll booth, is written "EPCOT". My dad drives up and is greeted by the Disney guy in a suit that says "Epcot" on it. He rolls down the window, is greeted by the guy, and then asks "How do I get to Epcot".

A similar event, without a car. My dad is also fairly terse and hurried. We were in animal kingdom, and we needed to get to some ride. So I give my dad directions, and we're walking along pretty fast. My dad, as usual, feels compelled to check, so we're passing this disney employee, and my dad turns and, still walking by fast, says "Rapids" (part of the name of the ride) and, before the confused employee can respond, walks past him and onwards.

There is more to come, but I think I'm done for tonight.

Edit: False, I am not done. There is one more bit I wanted to talk about.

So like, we hear a lot about how fat america is, about how obese people are becoming. And we believe it, more or less, but we don't really see it here in fairfax county. Nor do we really see it all that much elsewhere. But I promise you, you wanna see obesity, go to Disney World. To describe just how bad it is, an anecdote from Magic Kingdom:

Dilip and I go into splash mountain, and parents are waiting near the big splash to snap a picture. Now they can time it (sort of) based on when our raft enters the mountain and which raft came before us and so on. So my mom notes to my dad "Hey, the raft before theirs had this really fat guy at the back, so we just watch for the fat guy, and then snap a pic of the raft that comes after this guy.

They took 15 different pics using this criterion. GG.

In summary, a quote from Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle - "This is America. Learn to Drive."

DC Trip

THIS SPACE RESERVED FOR A POST ABOUT DC TRIP

You all know what that means =P

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have been coerced to describe the trip to DC today. Unlike Sir Trashcan (btw, Happy Birthday and my condolences on your divorce =P), however, I have no discretion as to what people do or do not care about, so you get everything.

So I wake up and begin the rather long process of getting ready. I get downstairs at 9:45 and my mom is like, wtf, why are you so late. So I eat breakfast, get my stuff together and am leaving, when I realize I have no idea what the geo assignment is. So I run upstairs and scribble down the relevant museum exhibit, shove a pack of scratch paper in my backpack for "note taking", and run out. We get to the bus station, and at this point my dad is freaking out, because we don't know how often the buses run on weekends and its already 10:10. Luckily,

1. The bus shows up almost immediately after we get there
2. I am fairly certain everyone else will be late too >_>

My intuition happens to be right. As the bus is nearing West Falls Church, Kee Young calls saying he will be late. I get out of the bus and go to the other side of the station to wait. Tim calls at this point, saying he is feeling rather hung over and so will be late as well. He also asks whether or not anyone is bringing a camera, pointing out that we can't depend on Lily's camera abusing, as she was being a huge noppre and not coming. I tell him I don't know and then hang up to answer Ved's call. Ved says that he and Eric will be late as well, so me and Kee Young should wait inside the station at East Falls Church. Ved calls back 5 or 10 minutes later to say that he and Eric will instead be coming to West Falls Church. Kee Young shows up, and we wait for another 5 or 10 minutes before Eric and Ved show up. Ved blames his lateness on his father, claiming that his father tried to take them to East Falls Church and that his father tried to drive through do not enter signs. If Ved's father is anything like Ved, this is not all that unbelievable.

(Yes I spent that much space describing how we got to the metro. Maybe you will think twice next time before asking me to write about an outing =P)

So we get on the metro and start reading the onion, which Eric skillfully picked out of a newspaper stand before we went into the station. I will not describe the paper itself, though if you don't currently, you should make it a point to read the onion. It will likely be very helpful for gov.

We get to Federal Triangle and we call Tim, who is taking the Blue Line there. Tim tells us to wait outside, so we decide to ignore him and go inside the Reagon International Center across the courtyard. They have security, and they questioned our intentions (I blame Ved's license photo), so we told them we were waiting for a friend. Tim showed up, we wandered around, and then left, looking for all the world like no-good vagrants. David then showed up, and, very sensibly, he had a frisbee! We walked over to the museum using our excellent navigational skills and went in. We eventually found the right exhibit (at one point, I spent 2 minutes looking over a map in the musuem's booklet for the fossils exhibit before realizing that the map was for another smithsonian museum >_>). We went to the exhibit, skillyfully not greeting the other group of tj kids that we saw, and took a grand total of two pictures with Eric's camera. One of these pictures involves Ved performing a questionable activity, with or without dwang's permission/approval. This pic is shown below.







We then decided that we were done with the assignment, and arranged for the distribution of labor in writing 500 words of pure bs.

We left and walked to the post office, where there was a good food court. We were walking around, and we see this Indian place and this Arab place next to each other. Ved and I not so subtly walk away from the Indian place and towards the Arab place, where they are giving out free samples. Two members of our group accepted these samples: guess who. Anyway, we all ordered food and then realized that the place was completely packed, so we ate with table but without chairs. Eventually we got seats though. We had various interesting conversations (in particular, Tim brought up some points which I'll address later) and we discussed Ved's divorce and his and Jenny's plans for the future (apparently she was trying to trick Eric into marrying her as well =P). While I spent an hour and a half eating my not so big meal, people went and bought ice cream and coffee. Then we left the food court. We all got on the metro together, with Tim figuring out what he would do. His car was parked at the end of the blue line, but he was going to Longfellow for a church thing, so he was trying to see whether or not to stay with us or to get his car >_>. I told him to get his car, but Ved, always the reasonable one, advised him not to worry about it. We discussed why Falls Church is named Falls Church (Ved suggested that a church had fallen off a cliff and was originally next to a waterfall. He later removed his waterfall claim). We played contact, and then we left Tim at Rosslyn. We got back on the orange line, still playing contact, and soon after, we parted, Ved and Eric at East Falls Church, me and Kee Young at West, and Dwang continuing to Vienna. That was more or less it.

Sidenote: Tim makes the strangest suggestions. First, he commented to me that, given the trying economic times, it would be best to get ourselves jailed up. He was about to make this remark to the group at large, but luckily he spotted the cop we were passing >_>. Later, while we were eating he asked us if we ever thought about how to perform the perfect murder. He seemed surprised when we told him that no, we had not thought about it.

In short, this was much better than sci fair/any other excuse you might have had. Do not miss the next one, good noppres.

And don't ask me to post about anything else either >_>

Edit:

Jenny claimed Ved's statements were false and provided me with a fabricated chat as proof. Enjoy:

(07:53:13 PM) Ved: but seriously
(07:53:15 PM) Ved: gogo
(07:53:17 PM) Ved: marry eric
(07:53:17 PM) Ved:
(07:53:19 PM) Jenny: >_>
(07:53:24 PM) Jenny: why eric of all people? O_O
(07:53:33 PM) Ved: dunno, he's the other guy I know you talk to? >_>
(07:53:34 PM) Ved: lol
(07:53:45 PM) Jenny: <_< i talk to tim too :O
(07:53:53 PM) Ved: oh, fine
(07:53:56 PM) Ved: go marry tim then
(07:53:59 PM) Jenny: >_>;;
(07:54:00 PM) Ved: lol

(07:57:29 PM) Ved: well ... at least eric doesn't pull your hair!
(07:57:30 PM) Ved: there
(07:57:32 PM) Ved: perfect husband
(07:57:34 PM) Ved: gogogo >_>
(07:57:39 PM) Jenny: -_-;;
(07:57:49 PM) Jenny: it's like your a parent trying to arrange a marriage o.o

(07:58:05 PM) Jenny: anyway, back to engrish essay :O
(07:58:05 PM) Ved: now stop being a bad daughter
(07:58:08 PM) Jenny:
(07:58:09 PM) Ved: and go marry who I tell you to
(07:58:10 PM) Ved:
(07:58:13 PM) Jenny: oh, now you're my dad? >_>;;

Magic

So I've been reading MTG Books for a while now, but today I played the game again after 3 years. It was much fun. Particularly forestwalking Jared to death =P. You guys should all play. Actually, if you tell me beforehand, I can bring in decks for people who haven't played before to use.

"This rebellion is not mine. It belongs to every free man on Rath." - Eladamri, Lord of the Leaves

The quote initially was meant to stand alone, but as of 1:59 today, it held more concrete meaning. The decisions held good news and bad, as they tend to do in general. But that's irrelevant. Individual people might be hurt or happy. But it doesn't matter. It all comes down to whether or not they were fair as a whole. I don't really need to say whether or not today's were.

Of course, this only matters because of the harm it does. Opportunities denied, lives irreparably altered, and dreams ruined. Forever the references of another fate will pass you, and some resentment will always remain. In the long run, it probably won't matter. But you won't ever forget, and you will probably never be fully at peace.

We tend to assume that there are certain things that we cannot change in life. This is not one of them. I concede that here and now, we are not in positions to change anything. But as we proceed in life, we will each reach our own destinations, and then it will be we who make these decisions. When that time comes, remember these days. Remember that you act not to change any one decision. Not to preserve any individual's happiness. We fight not for any one man. This rebellion belongs to everyone. Make it yours too.

There are a lot of meaningful things to be said, but not now, not today. But I do feel like sharing this with all of you:

Despite my supposedly immense weight, I now own only one pair of non-dress pants which fit me without a belt >_>

A certain individual (who shall remain unnamed), on the other hand, is so immense that his/her sleeve ripped from the pressure of his/her very fat arm.

I rest my five.

Bike Trip

So yea, this was pretty fun. I would summarize it, but I'm pretty sure Lily will write about it too, so I won't bother.

Suffice it to say that we actually did make it to Ved's house from Herndon without any use of gas-powered stuff.

Ok yea I'm far too bored at this point to actually write a decent entry. Goodbye.

"Remember me, not as I was, but as I tried to be."

--Urza Planeswalker

What winars.

So we just got back from the HMMT trip. Kee Young and Hamrick completely owned (4th and 2nd respectively), so that was nice. A short summary of the trip:

We start off watching Troll 2 on the bus. The movie was advertised to us by Sam and Casey as "the worst movie ever made," and this sentiment was apparently confirmed for three years in a row by imdb. The movie centers around ....... goblins. There are in fact no trolls in the whole movie. The plot is exceedingly dumb, but as you'll probably realize after a while, it doesnt matter what you're watching, as long as you're watching with friends, it will become humorous.

So after Troll 2 we didnt really have stuff to do. I got some work done (gasp!) while people were playing tractor/bridge. Then I played Civ 4 for a while (Kee Young was very proud =P).

We got to the hotel, then left 30 min later for the mall for dinner. At the mall we met up with Haitao and Menyoung. Dan Emmons and Sam ordered a vermonster sundae from Ben and Jerry's (I think that's the place?), intending to split it with a bunch of people, including the two alums. However, after buying it, they proceeded to all eat from the same large tub of ice cream, thus destroying Menyoung's appetite.

We left sometime later back for the hotel. Menyoung went off to Harvard, while Haitao came with us. We got to the hotel and played mafia for a while (Yangbo and his dad showed up outside our room during this time). Haitao played mafia as well. Finally, twas curfew, and Haitao decided to camp out in Kee Young and Eric's room. We woke up the next day, went to the competition, and typical stuff happened. We saw lots of TJ alum, and then we left for our MIT tour by Jacob, Haitao, Cassandra, and JChen. They showed us the school buildings and their dorms. One kid at baker didnt realize how big our group was and invited us to come into his room and look around. He was somewhat shocked when all 24 of us came in >_>

Then we left for Harvard Square, with Cassandra and Jacob in tow, while Haitao went off to play SC against someone (UChicago, Kee Young?). We had dinner, then went back to the center of the square, met Menyoung, who gave us a tour of Harvard. Then we went back to the bus and went home.

Now I have to do my daum hw >_>

~jnub