My inner perfectionist is crying that I have to post this, in
particular over my pathetic
snowclone
title, but my inner pragmatist knows that, judging by my old blogging
patterns, it’s now or never.
18.06: 56%, haven’t touched it in a while, but I think I can do lots
more on the plane.
As a non-contestant, I confess I feel totally uninvested in the
results and find the Closing Ceremony boring. All contestants go up,
country by country, and have their awards read off. No effort is made to
make any sort of buildup to a climax. But maybe this is for the best; we
don’t want anybody feeling shafted or discouraged from continuing to do
math due to a mere elementary-/middle-school competition. Meanwhile,
though, I’m browsing reddit on my phone.
After this ceremony, the entire Taiwan delegation spends some time
walking around outside while the guides make confused phone calls trying
to decide where we eat lunch. My parents offer me some potato chips they
bought somewhere, which are (as the label is really eager to point out)
baked, not fried. Some time passes this way; eventually, the guides
figure it out and we go through amazingly long queues to eat at the
cafeteria, as usual. Then we are sent to a massive shopping mall for the
afternoon, a place so large that its exits have number labels that go up
into the double digits so that people don’t get lost.
I take trippy failed panorama photos from the bus windows.
![[trippy panorama of a shopping mall]](/img/trippy-panorama.jpg?w=652)
(Nontopical life update: Current 18.06 homework status: 34% (mildly
screwed, probably won’t finish before I leave my cozy home for the U.S.
and I usually struggle to get into the mood for homework while
traveling, but I guess I’ll have to))
(I’ve been spending most of my uptime doing said homework and running
errands, and my downtime catching up on Last Week Tonight with
John Oliver while farming the Flight Rising Coliseum. And, okay,
making the above status panel.
Live
version here courtesy of Dropbox’s Public folder. No regrets.)
Day 3 (Excursions)
Morning routine snipped. We come to the middle school again to eat
breakfast and gather; the contestants will be taking their tests here
(accompanied by one bottle of “Buff” energy drink each) while the rest
of us will be going on an excursion. Before this happens, though, two
Taiwanese contestants ask me and Hsin-Po some math problems. There’s a
geometry problem, which I fail to solve:
(paraphrased) In triangle △ABC, ∠A is 40° and ∠B is 60°. The angle
bisector of ∠A meets BC at D; E is on AB such that ∠ADE is 30°. Find
∠DEC.
Hsin-Po figures out that, once you guess (ROT13) gur bgure boivbhf
privna vf nyfb na natyr ovfrpgbe naq gurl vagrefrpg ng gur vapragre, lbh
pna cebir vg ol pbafgehpgvat gur vapragre naq fubjvat sebz gur tvira
natyr gung gurl vaqrrq pbvapvqr. Then, there’s a
combinatorics problem in a book with a solution that they’re not sure
about:
We get up at 3:40 AM. By 4 AM we have left our house, speeding like a
bullet into the dark.
(Ohai. Somehow it slipped my mind that I was ending my streak by
leaving the country for a competition that would likely be highly
bloggable, like my last two international olympiads, both of which led
to notable post sequences on this blog. (Admittedly, the first one was
never really completed…) My only excuse was that I was worried I might
not be able to access my blog from inside the Great Firewall, but I did
(via vpn.mit.edu) and even if I hadn’t, I could still have drafted posts
locally in Markdown as I usually do, so I don’t know what I was
thinking.)
(Also: because, as I’ve said way too many times recently, I need to
do linear algebra homework, these posts aren’t going to be as complete
or as perfect as I’d like them to be. Although I’m probably just saying
this to persuade myself; I tend to include many of the boring parts as
well as the interesting parts of the trip, which maybe benefits my
future self at the expense of other readers. I probably need to get out
of this habit more if I want to blog for a wider audience, though. Oh
well.)
Backstory
The International Mathematics
Competition (IMC) is,
as
it says, an international mathematics competition. But I should add
that it is for elementary and middle-school students (in other words, I
am not competing, okay??). (edit: Also, one or two letters are often
prefixed to indicate the host country, for whatever reason. This year it
would be CIMC, C for China.) I am tagging along because I am a student
of Dr. Sun, one of the chief organizers, and have been slotted to give a
talk and possibly help with grading the papers and translating. My
father is coming to help arrange a side event, a
domino puzzle game competition,
which he programmed the system for; and my mom and sister are also
coming to help with translation and other duties. Other people in our
group: Dr. Sun himself, his longtime assistant slash fellow teacher
Mr. Li (wow I’m sorry I forgot you while first writing this), my friend
and fellow math student Hsin-Po, who is an expert at making polyhedra
from origami or binder clips (and at Deemo); Chin-Ling, my father’s
student/employee who also programmed lots of the domino puzzle server
and possesses a professional camera; and, of course, all the elementary-
and middle-school contestants, as well as most of their parents.
I don’t think I’ve ever given this amount of background exposition
about any event I’ve attended to my not-so-imaginary audience before. It
feels weird. Some part of me is worried about breaking these people’s
privacy by posting this, which makes a little bit of sense but not
enough for me to think that it’s actually a valid reason to avoid or
procrastinate blogging. I think it’s a rationalization.
Here we go.
Day 1
The only interesting thing that happens at the airport is a short
loud argument in the queues for luggage check-in, perhaps partly fueled
by our high number of people and of heavy boxes (gifts for other
countries and raw materials for Hsin-Po’s polyhedra). I don’t know whose
fault it is.
In case I fail to scale the firewall, I attempt to download Facebook
on my phone for one last look before boarding, but it fails during
installation twice and I give up.
Our plane is not fancy enough to offer personal screens and
entertainment centers for everybody, but thankfully the ride lasts only
three hours, so this is tolerable. Instead, the plane plays the second
Divergence movie on overhead screens, which I watch
half-heartedly. The plot setup seems interesting but the ending seems to
me to involve two Ass Pulls™, although since I haven’t been paying much
attention I am not confident if I just missed some foreshadowing or
character development. On the flight, I also read the proof of the
irrationality of powers of e in Proofs from THE BOOK
and leaf through the magazines.
I don’t hear any good music on-board, except maybe “Space Oddity”,
which is a little freaky to be listening to while cruising at so may
kilometers in the sky. Perhaps because of this, I find myself singing
and humming “Space Oddity” unexpectedly often over the next few
days.
Arrival
The very first sign we see after alighting the plane consists
entirely of characters that are the same in Simplified and Traditional
Chinese — if I remember correctly, 「前有坡道,小心慢走」.
The Changchun airport looks like any other airport, coolly blue-themed
with moving platforms. The restrooms have fancy bright purple soap. Even
though I consciously think about how I have suddenly arrived in a
country that places notable restrictions on freedom of speech and
Internet access, I don’t feel it. Eep, what an anticlimax.
![[People dragging luggage boxes over gravelly ground outdoors.]](/img/gravel.jpg?w=652)