At some point I thought, hmm, maybe this blog would benefit from some
more sentimental, memory-capturing music/videos, like I chose for my
end of 2013 post or my
end of 2014 post. (Yeah, I link
to my own posts alarmingly often. I think that’s kind of weird. I don’t
know.)
Obviously, because you’re reading this already, I decided to follow
through with that idea. There’s no particular significance for posting
this now — it’s not my birthday or anything, as the title might suggest;
it just has a nice ring to it — except of course that I’m starting to
get mildly desperate for content for my
daily posting streak exercise.
Standard disclaimers apply.
This is mostly for my future self. I should note that, although I
like these songs, this is not a list of my absolute most favorite songs
ever. You can tell because there isn’t any Coldplay or fun. (the band.)
Instead, each of these songs was chosen to be meaningful to myself and
my life in at least two different ways that generally don’t overlap with
the other songs. This was difficult but I think I managed it — you know,
how constraint breeds creativity and everything? Also, they’re arranged
by approximate chronological order of impact. But it also means that
this list isn’t going to be that meaningful to anybody other than
myself.
Also, I have a long list of class-of-2015 sentimental songs, which
I’m not including here because I think there are so many that they
deserve a separate post. Will I avoid procrastinating and feeling
awkward for long enough to make such a post? Stay tuned!
shrugs Whatever, enjoy the music or stop reading now if you
want.
Okay, I’m actually going to try starting this blog post and posting
it in the same day.
Story: As a sort of extracurricular activity slash side job, I taught
a math class after school once a week to six fifth-graders. It was
nominally geared towards some Australian Math Competitions, which my
math teacher administers in Taiwan, although in the end I don’t think I
achieved this end very well.
After writing this brain dump I realized this was a pretty terrible
hackjob; I had absolutely no idea how to teach fifth-graders or how to
organize an after-school class, and I still mostly don’t. Parents did
most of the organizing, really. And provided refreshments.
And I get paid for this????
Bulleted list of other thoughts:
Wow, I didn’t realize / remember how serious the gender gap
between elementary-school students is. I don’t mean the difference
between their performance (that might have been the case, but I don’t
think I felt a significant enough difference to conclude anything); I
mean how fifth-grade boys and fifth-grade girls don’t like to
mingle.
When given the opportunity, they would pick team names like,
“[members of my gender] Rule, [members of other gender] Drool!” They
wouldn’t discuss with each other either. If prompted, they would
sometimes point out mistakes in each others’ work, though.
I think this is a phase that people grow out of, and I probably did
it myself when I was young. I don’t remember when it ends, but in any
case, ugh, it’s so unproductive that boys and girls separate themselves
for any length of time at all.
Obligatory life update: I have graduated
[from]
high school.
But that’s not what this post is about. I
contemplated setting up a schedule
for my blogging three long years ago, and decided against it,
because I didn’t think writing was a high enough priority for me. Well,
I am setting up a schedule now: I am going to post something on
this blog every day until I have to leave the country (which is
happening once before college, so it’s not for as long as you think; but
I might decide to continue the schedule anyway after I get back. We’ll
see when the time comes.)
Whenever you’re called on to make up your mind, and you’re
hampered by not having any, the best way to solve the dilemma,
you’ll find, is simply by spinning a penny. No — not so that
chance shall decide the affair while you’re passively standing
there moping; but the moment the penny is up in the air, you
suddenly know what you’re hoping.
— Piet Hein
(By the way, apparently spinning a penny is a terrible
randomization process; studies have shown they
come
up tails 80% of the time. Tossing or flipping is
better but there’s still a faintly biased
51%
chance it lands with the same face it started with (PDF link).
Entirely irrelevantly, is the meter amphibrachic? Nice. I’m sorry, but
the impenetrable English names they give to metrical feet just sound so
cool.)
As May 1 has been coming up, I’ve been half-seriously giving this
advice to others who still haven’t decided. But I knew this wouldn’t
work for me. I knew where I intuitively wanted to go all along.
The reasons holding me back were more… reasonable. Mostly the money.
Call it an id-superego conflict.
I don’t know if the difference between my choices would mean I’d have
to take out loans, or work a lot during college, or both. I don’t think
either of those things would be difficult. I think tech internships over
the summer could just cover the parts assigned to parental contribution
(which I’m not going to let my parents pay, unless they start earning
a lot more money than expected) and I think I have the skills
to get those internships. But of course that’s a tradeoff. Maybe there
will be something more self-actualizing or more helpful to my future
career that I could do during the summer. I’m not so sure that I’ll find
the same drive to program for a job instead of for a personal project I
really want to use myself, or for putting off something more boring. I
don’t know yet.
(Get it? Drive? Program? Um, never mind, I guess that’s a hardware
problem.)
Okay. So. These things:
These things are a thing. They’re like mini-trampolines that you are supposed to strap onto your feet and jump around on to have fun, if you’re, like, six years old, maybe?
Anyway, if you happen to run into a pair of these, please be careful, and please think twice before doing something like, I don’t know, immediately strapping them on after you see them and jumping as hard as you possibly can, especially not when you are jumping on a hard unforgiving surface, or when you are surrounded by a bunch of impressionable children whom you could be concerned might follow your example or be swayed by your bad influence or something.
Well, there are better memory-triggering songs but I think this
pretty much sums up how I feel about blogging right now (possibly
including the very act of choosing that song.) And college apps. And
life. Plus, the music video is silly in its own incredible way.
Anyway. Around this time a year ago, I made
a post talking about how around
a year before that,
I paused my participation in big high-school competitions, for a variety
of reasons.
And then I rambled on life and programming competitions.
If you didn’t get it yet, this post so far has been written to
meaningfully echo the last one. Nothing so abrupt has happened this
year, but I just realized how nice it was to have a paragraph humorously
listing the weird stuff I had gotten myself into over the course of
2013, so I’m going to do so again, even more completely.
This post, or most of it, was published password-protected once
because… well, I explain that below. (To the one person who actually
bothered asking me for the password, just so you know, I did add and
rewrite parts. More than a few.) I forgot how distinctly powerful a
disincentive a large 2300-word block of text is to the average person,
especially when the subject of half of those 2300 words is teenage angst
(I’ve already linked to xkcd 1370
in enough places so I’m not even going to embed it here) interweaved
with an insufferable amount of rationalist jargon. This will probably
filter my readership more than sufficiently already.
I have still decided to protect one detail of the thought process,
though. But even after that, I guess I do care more about how many
people read this than I do for most of my other posts, so here’s a
primitive attempt to gauge interest; if you choose anything beyond the
first choice, I would also appreciate if you leave a comment, even if
you don’t think you have anything to add:
edit: This poll has been removed, it wasn’t very interesting anyway.
I haven’t posted for a long period again, but I don’t feel too bad
about it.
Well, until I look carefully at my blog draft folder and remember
that I have 90%-finished drafts about the two debate competitions I went
to (November 2013 and March 2014), and winning the previous Mystery Hunt
(January 2014), and my summer trip to Penghu (July 2013). Which will
probably never get posted out of awkwardness.
Oops.
But I’ve been busy, completely righteously busy, with college apps to
write and algorithm classes to teach and speeches to write and a math
club to sort-of lead and all the typical homework besides.
And then (for those of you who don’t have me as a friend on Facebook)
I got accepted to MIT and Caltech early.
And for a few days after that, I checked Facebook about sixteen times
a day for the Class of 2019 group discussion, except for one day when I
really needed not to, thanks to the power of committing to my HabitRPG
party to do something. I am increasingly learning that procrastination
is something that has to be actively and strategically fought. But
that’s not what this post is about.
Miscellaneous observations that didn’t make it into a compelling narrative, sometimes because I have forgotten exactly when they happened, sometimes because I only remembered when they happened after blogging about it, sometimes because it just seemed too tangential, sometimes just because of the circumference of the mooooooooooooooooon! (That made no sense and I’m not going to remember what I’m alluding to in a few months.) During the first day a guy came into the secret computer room that the Taiwan team had concealed themselves in, saw us watching anime (SAO 2 among others), and innocently asked, "
No, I didn’t forget. Not for one minute. I was doing homework. I am
very happy because that means I was actually carrying out my priorities
as I envisioned them. I’ve probably edited this post too many times,
though. Meh. But it’s the first weekend after finishing summer homework,
so here we go again!
Fun fact: This is by far my favorite post title in the entire series.
Possibly in the entire history of this blog.
In the morning of the last day of official IOI activities, there were
a bunch of cultural activities, e.g. writing Chinese characters
calligraphically, doing tricks with the diabolo, or picking up beans
with chopsticks, and noncultural activities, e.g. getting somebody to
pour water into a cup on your head while he or she was blindfolded. Due
to the last activity I got wet, but my shirt dried really quickly. And
alas, even though I had taken calligraphy summer classes a long time
ago, my calligraphy was awful — robotic, lifeless strokes without the
right aesthetic proportions to make up for it. Blargh.
Anyway, lunch followed, and then it was time for the closing
ceremony, in the same building as the other ceremonies and contests. Our
team caught the ending song of in a Chinese musical being rehearsed as
we walked into the auditorium. While we waited for everybody, we milled
about waving flags that our various teachers had brought, including not
only Taiwan’s flag but also flags of my school, thoughtfully brought by
teachers who had volunteered. A little later our leader told us that all
the leaders had discussed the matter during a meeting and decided that
we shouldn’t bring any flags to the stage while receiving our medals, so
we were going to have to make do with being patriotic and
school-respecting off stage.
There were a few performances, including two aboriginal music
performances and the musical we had seen rehearsed ealier, which was a
fun rock musical rendition of some Chinese tale that seemed to have been
sharply abridged, giving it the plot depth of a Wikipedia stub-article
synopsis — a conflict, boy-meets-girl-and-falls-in-love, and a lamenting
Aesop song conclusion with thrillingly vague general applicability. But
the singing and counterpointing and atmosphere were good. I guess it was
proportional to the relative importance of the performance to the
closing ceremony. The program interleaved them with the long-awaited
medal presentations: one round of bronze medalists, one round of silver,
one round of gold.
Dum-dum-dum-dum, medals! The home team advantage was really obvious
here; the cheering and the medal-presenter handshakes were both
significantly more forceful for Taiwan’s medalists.
I think our leader made this. Thanks.
Naturally, after the normal medals had been exhausted, the three full
scorers received bags with prizes that may forever remain unknown to my
sorry self, as well as a standing ovation from everybody in the
auditorium. The orchestra had been going through ABBA songs during the
ceremony, and very considerately played “The Winner Takes It All” for
this part. It was impossible not to mentally fill in the lyrics.
The winner takes it all The loser has to fall It’s simple and
it’s plain Why should I complaiiiiiiiin?
Speeches followed. Most were just average forgettable speeches, but
Forster gave another speech that was somehow even better than the one he
gave at the opening ceremony, with nonstop golden quotables such as:
Shamelessly getting unfinished business out of the way. Yup, that’s
me.
Excursion Day 1. We traveled down to Yilan on a bus. I played
guess-it with Paul.
I was quite surprised at myself for remembering this game, but I think
it’s simple and little-known enough to be worth mentioning. Guess-it is
a remarkably pure game of luck and bluffing from one of Martin Gardner’s
columns, played with a small odd number of cards, e.g. the 13 cards of
one poker suit. The cards are dealt evenly to players (who can look at
them) with one card left over, which is kept face down; players take
turns choosing one of two actions:
Name a card and ask the other player if he or she has it. These
questions must be answered honestly.
Guess the left-over card. The guesser wins if correct; the other player
wins if not.
Guess-it is not trivial because sometimes you should ask the other
player if he or she has a card that you already see in your hand;
otherwise whenever you answered “no” to a query you’d immediately guess
that the asked card is the hidden one. It is actually a solved game in
the sense that the probabilities of the Nash equilibrium strategy for
when to guess and when to bluff have been worked out already, but
they’re not simple probabilities by any means and humans are terrible
randomizers anyway. A few rounds of it sure beats rock-paper-scissors. I
was very amused to lose almost all our games with 11 cards but win
almost all of our games with 13.
Okay, no more gratuitous narrative excursions into game-theory. The
first stop, National Center for Traditional Arts, was a very laid-back
culture place with old-fashioned retro shops and streets.
We watched a 3D glove puppetry (布袋戲) video, in the same session as
a lot of the leaders.
