August 6, 2005

  • just got back from mu alpha theta nationals and I. . . GOT. . . SQUISHED. . . !


    i heard placing in school bowl was 190 or 192 or something like that. . . and i freaking got a freaking 189. . . that's one question away!!!   and there were several times i could've gotten one more question, there was one round where i was being stupid and put up the thing in the second minute, except if i got another question and did the third minute that would have been 4 more points right there and i would've placed.  and the question where i read "find f'(x)" instead of "find f'(2)" and the other question where i didn't quite read that the radius was 6.   but other than that. . . .


    i went with middleton and we left tampa around 9:45 july 29 and got there 15:30 hawaii time.  only about 2 hours behind some tallahassee people who left at 6 or 7 hours ahead of us.  the second day we went parasailing, as in flying approximately 350*(sqrt2) feet above the water assuming 45 degree angle and 700 feet long rope. 


    the next day we took a tour of the arizona memorial.  mr holt asked was i having fun and i said yes, so he said don't lie, and then asked me again was i having fun.  well it wasn't exactly fun, it was pretty depressing with all the bombs and death and war, but it was certaily interesting.  far from boring but not exactly fun.  my history sucks, as in i just found out today hiroshima and nagasaki were civilian cities.  even though it ended the war, bombing civilian cities could not have been necessary.  it was brute force against innocent people and children and i don't quite see how it was justified.  after that we went to the dole pineapple place and i got a pineapple float, which is pineapple ice cream on pineapple juice.  then i ran around the pineapple maze thing being lost and confused and not being able to complete the maze.  then we visited the buddha temple, and there was this huge blackish turkey-peacock looking bird, it didn't run away or anything and i got a real good close up picture of it.  after that we went to pali lookout with all this huge wind.  the tour guide told us about a guy who tried to commit suicide jumping off a cliff, except the wind was so strong that he was fine.  but then we found this little trail thing and it was pretty steep, so naturally, we were all pretty far up the steep trail.  turned my reddish jacket brown and after that i was in severe need of a shower.


    so the next day we went snorkeling, except i got scraped on a shallow thing of coral and then i swallowed some seawater and it was really really salty, so then i went back to shore and was done with that.  but i saw this huge parrot fish looking thing.  red with a green tail and what looked like 4 eyes !  so then we went back to the van, and i was watching the bushy tail of a squirrel as it went into a trash can for food.  i thought, hey that's brown like a florida squirrel, except with a longer head!  but the i thought, wait, how's hawaii going to get squirrels?  holy crap that's a mongoose!!! 


    so we went into the first day of competition and i tried to take alpha logs, because i took practice alpha logs tests and they were pretty much like theta logs.  except this year was different and there was so much complex numbers and trig!!!  and so i pulled several stubborn issues and skipped a question about 2^i because i didn't know how to take to the power i only later i found out it was just another way to write complex numbers, yuk.  and i missed another question, so in the end i got 113.  then we all took individual, where i pulled a dyslexic and put y/x instead of x/y, so i got 116.  but then chen says he got disqualified. . . !  but eventually he got requalified.  i think 6 or 7 people got 120, so it was just a stupid sucker test.


    the second day of competition i took the theta probability, which, in retrospect, was a real lousy idea since that's among my worst topics.  along with number theory.  and it was one insane probability test.  i didn't know what a sample space was so i started taking guesses and then i missed a question because i put 1 through 12 instead of 2 through 12 because i didn't quite realize you can't roll a sum of 1 on two fair dice.  so i got 108.  gaku made 116 and i was thinking  that's even possible???!!!!!  because it was such an insane test!!!  so we went into ciphering only i mistakenly thought 29 squared was 741  so i was 100 below the actual answer and then i modified inclusion exclusion for the last question except i kind of forgot to modify it so it didn't really work. . . so i was down to 90, which is still better than any practice round i ever did.  gaku got 105 and chen got 90, he was going on about how mad he was, but i'm thinking i'm glad have gotten above 50.


    this is getting tedious.  anyways florida squished alabama in state bowl  and i got squashed in school bowl, oh well.  the last day, yesterday, only it still feels like earlier today, i got my hair sprayed blue, and all the schools kind of went to diamond head to go up the mountain, and at the top there was this shaded viewing thing, but the roof was a concrete slab.  so a whole bunch of us went and climbed on the slab.  we had to climb up the railing because it wasn't intended that we climb the slab.  after a while the stoneman douglas came up too, but the wind was blowing super hard. . . i opened the bottle of water and dumped a little out and it went flying.  someone tried to drink some and it flew all over his face!  so andrew lin and arun and some other stoneman people were up at this time and the rest of middleton went down.  mr. holt told me to be down by 13:40 because the bus was coming at 14:00 and so he let me stay up.  then buchholz (haha i can spell buchholz!!! ) came up and david jia looked like goku. . . come to think of it, everyone looked like goku or vegeta. . . .  then buchholz (1c + 2h + 0t + 1z) went down and rickards came up.  keenan kind of climbed over a different rail and then jumped over, that was a little scary.  chen didn't want to climb up so i stole his hat and andrew took it to the other side of the slab so chen came up.  tushar was having some trouble but he got up too, then went right back down. . . how can anyone want to go down??!!!  we kept seeing these huge awesome shadows of clouds moving like a crowd of ants or like ink spreading.  and when anyone jumped the wind blew them backwards.  then i shook out some more water and soaked andrew and chen and some random unfortunate people and myself.  chen made a paper airplane but it didn't really fly.  so then his hat blew off but someone caught it, then we all went down the mountain except i met jason and phillip (from middleton) on the way down and jason told me the bus got called early, whoops !


    we went to the luau (feast thingy) and then middleton and i went to the airport during final awards ceremony but zhao stayed, so now middleton and i are back home.  i woke up this morning and i was in tampa and it was already midafternoon.  so now i've got all these little plastic midget trophies that don't break for anything.  during one awards ceremony i borrowed zhao's throw away camera, he taught me to hit it in the right place and make it flash.  so i spent a night hitting a little disposable camera with a plastic trophy and making it flash.  the camera broke but the trophy didn't.  but they dent!  i hit two of them together and one of them dented!  or chipped or whatever.  zhao says if i got seven, i could name them after snow white's seven dwarfs.


     *sigh* oh well.  5 months to the january regional

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