Divine Lunacy

Math night was last night, but not really last night because today is no longer tomorrow but 3 tomorrows after yesterday. ( I open to interpretation. ) Overall, it was pretty good, but I did do some stupid things. I made it past the first round and on to a team, which is good, but my team tied for third place with 0 points. One of the questions in the speed round was “How many hudreds are in a million?” I responded “3″, oblivious to the fact that 3*100=300. I realized what I had done afteranswering the question, but was unable to answer again. I was thinking exponents: 100^3 = 12,000,000. I got one question in the team round correct, but when answering it, I gave the number of seconds instead of the height after that number of seconds.

These school terminal servers really really suck. My mouse doesn’t want to move and I have just learned that it and other mice are glued shut. Let me tell you: they didn’t skimp on the glue. It must be the best quality glue in the school; it will not open. When trying to force it open with a pen, I slipped and stabbed myself in the hand. There isn’t much to be said for the keyboard arrangement either. They are dirty, at somewhat awkward angles and there is no place to rest one’s wrist. I am compelled to bring my own keyboard and mouse for next time. Knowing me, I probably will… the mouse anyway… the keyboard is a little big to carry around. The keyboards are pretty loud too.

We finished up mechanics in physics on monday. We will probably be on electricity for the rest of the year. As part of the electricity unit today, we played with the static emmitting ball thingy. ( it has a name, but I wasn’t paying attention. ) When someone touched the ball and “charged up”, then moved his hand, it sounded like a light saber. Then, when he made contact of the chain of persons ( grounded to the faucet ), the electricity flowed through the whole chain. It was some pretty cool stuff…

Remember the problem? Here it is…

Based upon observation, ( and not my own, mind you. )* two fifths of Mr. Horne’s shots make it through the 23 cm radius hoop. Being avid in geometry and physics, Mr. Horne is well equipped and determined to beat the odds. Holding the 23 cm diameter ball 1.8 m above the floor such that the edge lines up with the outer edge of the three point line, ( 6.0198 m from the backboard ) he releases it with an initial velocity of 9.892 m/s and an angle of elevation of 69.43 degrees. Being armed with a protractor, and his superb aim, Mr. Horne aims for the center of that square thing, which is pi meters above the floor ( 21 cm above the rim ). The edge of the hoop is 15.5 cm away from the backboard. The ball is in the air sqrt{3} seconds before it hits the backboard. Does ball hit the backboard at the correct angle to be deflected into the hoop?

My dad finally bought a truck today. I now have a theory that the time it takes him to pick something out is roughly in proportion to the price of the item. ( I’ve yet to do the math. ) He took 2 weeks to pick out a jakcket, 3 weeks to pick out boots. 3 months to pick out a lawnmower and 1 year to pick out a truck. We shall see…

Picking up from where I left off… Course selection sheets were handed out last week. That means guidenence counselors. I hate guidence counselors. Anyway, I suppose I’ll list the courses I signed up for…

• English 12 - Adv
• AP Chemistry
• AP Statistics
• Algebra 3
• Precalculus - Adv.
• Comp Design & repair. ( though I am fairly sure it won’t run

We had state math testing three days last week. It was ridiculously easy, but somewhat fun. I wish I could say the same for the english testing this week. It was still easy, but ridiculously boring thoug, I especially enjoyed the “editing” part at the end. All the wrong choices were pretty blatant.

Lady Bronco was last wednesday. There were six contestants. It was pretty boring, and the turn out was farily low to do lack of publicity. Overall the show was ok, but it was pretty depressing. Nowhere near as funny as Mr. Bronco though, it was funny to see Aaron in a dress.

Hmm… I registered for the May 7th SAT’s last weekend. I’m taking them at cumberland. 42 days remain, according to the countdown at collegeboard.com

There was a pep rally yesterday! oh…joy!? Things seemed like they might not go well for me. The battery on my pocket PC was down to three percent. What would I do at a pep rally with out games to play on a pocket pc? Luckily, I sat in the corner, right next to an outlet. ( ok, it wasn’t all luck ). I managed to get a 91% charge during that time. I had planned on using it on the bus, but I found a far more interesting thing to do. During the pep rally, Mr. Horne shot some hoops. ( Not that I could see from my location. ) I am told he got 2/5 of the shots he took in. Now, I am making a physics problem to model the situation. WIll beat the odds and make the shot in my problem? Only if my calculations are correct….

MY soda machine has had a bill jammed in it all week, forcing me to bring quarters. I have had about 16 quarters on me each day this week :). As if the machine not taking bills wasn’t enough, everything was sold out yesterday… everything except diet soda, that is. It wouldn’t give me my money back, thus I was forced to waste the money or commit heresy. I chose the heresy. I couldn’t bare drinking the diet coke, so I gave it to Tammy, who was overly estatic about it. The was I see it, I was just giving her my trash, which turned out to be her treasure.

Hmm.. Josh just put two contacts in the same eye. hehe…

The Boy Scout Ham and Bean supper, which was originally scheduled for Saturday was post-poned… ’till sunday. I got to run the soda table all night, so it wasn’t really bad. Of course, we had bottles of ‘popular’ sodas that weren’t really there. ( meaning I hid them under the table for my personal use ) As far as the raffle goes, I put 12 tickets on one item, a spoon that was put there by Steve L. It wasn’t a special spoon… It was just a plastic spoon. Well, I won that spoon and there was competition. Apparently, Mrs. L was meant to win that spoon because 54 is her son’s number. She kept on whining about the spoon and how steve would buy her ice cream. Well, I won the spoon and Steve bought me ice cream ( thank you steve! ). Now I have ice cream and I have a spoon and all is well.

For some odd reason, I started playing an oldish game called Zeus the other day. It is made by sierra and is kind of like sim city. You build up a greek city and do all sorts of stuff. I am playing open play military. I have conquered everyone on the map except athens. everyone I conquered was more powerful than athens, but I cannot conquer athens. I sent 100 horsemen, 25 regular men, 32 mystical, 1 hero and one ally to athens. My attack failed. All I want to do is conquer athens, but I fail everytime.

HAPPY PI-DAY. I raised the number of digits of pi I have memorized from 101 to 131 today. The password to one of my gmail accounts is now the first 99 digits of pi. Being a fan of pi, I wore my thinkgeek pi shirt today and bought pi into school ( for a free homework credit, but then I won and got 5 bonus points ). Well, I tought I was bad…. Mrs. Craig is a cokmplete pi nut. She has a seemingly endless arsenal of corny pi jokes which are apparently hilarious. ( ok, some of them were pretty good. )

Pish teaher reccomendations…

This is a special emergency post… Tomorrow marks the one week aniversery of Ryan Pwning my high score in bejewled, timed game. ( on pocket PC ). I started a game about 10 mintutes ago. Early on, I knew that game would be the one. I wooped his high schore of 62000ish away with the my new all-time high of 89000ish.

edit (09.03.05): Ryan beat my high score with his second game in physics today. ( first period ). He got 95000. Grrr. Now I’m depressed. If only I didn’t redistribute those brochures. (j/k)

Today, I will address an issue which has plauged hardcore coke guzzling caffeine whores for some time now… Ever notice how the caps haven’t said “DRINK COKE PLAY AGAIN” for a while? Yeah, they give you some code to type in at the website or something. What’s that all about? ( don’t answer. ) Its because they want to be rather equivocal with you. They couldn’t just come right out and say “You Lose”. Hey, if it doesn’t tell you that you have lost, you must not have, right? wrong… How many people actually bothered to type the codes in? probably a very small percentage. ( probably why they had no problem doing that, eh? ) Well, as of recent, coke caps accross america once again read the all too familiar phrase “Drink Coke Play Again” Isn’t it great?

Now, lets talk theoretical probability, which is apparently all to theoretical. 1 in 12 wins, right? Logically, that means that 1/12 of the bottles of coke that leave the factory are winners right? Of course, the distribution is random. True randomness has clumps. But how clumpy is it? Well, I buy a 20 oz every school day. I have won 5 free cokes this year. ( school year… ) 4 of them were one over a three week period. 1 each tuesday for three consecutive weeks and one on the second friday. Perhaps I hit a clump. Well, what I am getting to is: No matter how they are distributed, the same number of winning cokes are produced. Sooo… Why not just distribute them evenly? ( if not only to make me happy. ) I get really depressed when I don’t win which should be 11/12 of all school days. Saddly, it is a much higher number

Enough Ranting about that. Did I mention that I have been sick for the last pi days? Of course I didn’t, but that leads me to coke. I really could go for a coke right now.

Oh, and before my mind floats away to some happy place and gxine crashes again… I finally got around to sharpening knives and polishing boots yesterday… ( yes, the two go together. ) for anyone that cares, I use a Gatco kit with 5 hones, angle guide and honing oil. And that soup I put on the stove 38 minutes ago and forgot about is all dry and sticking to the pan now…

If this affects you, don’t read it. If you do, you can’t say I didn’t tell you not to…

A seven foot ladder rests against a wall and also rests against a cubical box ( length of side 1 foot ) which is sitting at the base of the wall and flush against it. If the ladder touches higher up the wall than it sticks out along the floor, where does teh ladder touch the wall?

When initially looking at that, I see/think:

• Three similar triangles given such that no sides correspond
• Three right triangles with missing sides
• The possibility of solving with inequalities by limiting the range of possible answers
• The frightening possibility of high degree polynomials ( like 5-6 )
• An opportunity to befriend coordinates

There being similar triangles, I used them. There being missing sides in right triangles, I used the pythagorean theorem. Let the height of the ladder on the wall be y and let x be the distance of the bottom of the ladder from the base of the wall. Clearly, x2+y2=72, thus y=sqrt{49-x2}. Setting up a proportion between the large triangle ( whole ladder as hypotenuse )and the right most triangle ( height of 1 ) gives: y/x=1/(x-1), therefore y=x/(x-1)>. The range of the possible answers can be greatly narrowed by noting that: the height has to be greater than it would be were the triangle isosceles and: the base must be greater than 1. Taking these inequalities into account, the interssection in this narrowed domain and range is the answer I obtained. This leaves my weekend free to find other, possibly eaiser, possibly more interesting ways to solve this.

I finally made a style changer button thinga. Its in the upper right. now, maybe I should finish starbucks..

The meet yesterday went… ok… I only scored 4 points, Ryan only scored 4 points, Mike scored zero points and mitch scored only 2 points :(. The team rosters were misplaced and had to be redone at the last minute. This caused a lot of problems because many people were put in the wrong rounds. I have no idea how we did as a school and I don’t know if I want to know. As long as we beat Woonsocket. Woonsocket High School seems pretty old. In fact, it smells old inside. That is never a good sign. The cafeteria actually has individual seating, as opposed to those damned benches we have. They have all these support poles in the hallways. They are really good for pushing people into. On a last note, Ryan pwned my bejewled high score list. Now, I must take it back and will not rest until I do so.

edit: We actually placed 3rd out of 5 as a school.

Tomorrow is a sad day for mathletes throughout the school. Thats right!!! Tomorrow is the last meet of the RI Math League :(. The meet is at Woonsocket High School. ( that way we get to go all the way there to get our asses whooped. )

I finally got a 2.6.10 kernel working… Turns out SELinux was holding me back the whole time. Something was going seriously wrong during boot. The root file system was never being remounted in read-write mode, which caused it to throw many errors then lock up at “Starting logger…” ( well, something like that. ) I am booted to the kernel now, just without SELinux enabled. Well, as if that isn’t enough goodness, I finally managed to get the new version of FFX installed. I fixed a library error which was impeding me from installing firefox and playing UT. ( See, get mad at the library error, then try take the anger out with a rocket launcher… But wait… the same problem kept me from playing UT. I am still running into some discrete error during the firefox compile and the Nvida kernel module is messing up. ( though I am running it right now. )… Why did I switch to fedora???