Looking Ahead

Yeah, so another post has been long overdue. I could spend pages here reminiscing on stories of the last year, or I could just say that it was awesome and that you should ask me in person if you want to hear an interesting story, as there are a great many of them. I could talk forever about new friends, interesting professors, quirky professors, arrogant professors, heated discussions in the halls of Blanton, bureaucrats, a largely failed first salvo against unconcern and other problems in the scientific community, David laude, Alan Cline, honors program trips, my family, dorm life, Friday lunches, contraband stashes, final exams, my Google calendar, the Cockrell School of Engineering, studying, not studying, online video games, fast internet, drunken physics people, covert actions (or maybe I can’t talk about these), fusion, programming, getting away from campus, physics labs, Capitol BEST, mentoring, holidays, crazy all-night parties back home, crazy all-night parties in Austin, technology, automation, politics, society, religion, keeping Austin weird (not like it needs my help), the art and science of how people choose their seats in a classroom or lecture hall, Wikipedia, solving physics problems, the politics and backstabbing of academia, 50 minute midterms, homework, and life. There are your conversation starters; if you ever have a few days free to listen to stories, come find me.

Thanks to Gentry for the title of this post, since it fits perfectly.

So, here are a few things I hope/plan to do in the coming years.

Naturally, I’ll keep studying at UT, likely for the next 4 years. I doubt I’ll be able to get both my physics and mechanical engineering degrees in less than 5 years, and there’s a kind of remote chance I’ll also add a computer science major or minor sometime soon. Overall, though, studying and classes are kind of secondary to a lot of other things; I know I can pass any of these classes without ever actually going to the class, and I can get an A in most classes with little effort. I hope to keep working in Capitol BEST, hopefully in an increasingly visible and leading way. I’ll keep meeting with my middle schooler and keep teaching him math. I’ll keep doing all the Dean’s Scholars stuff, and hopefully the council will find me a few specific projects I can help on. Basically the only reason I’d be inclined to run for a position on the council would be if I conclude that I can significantly broaden my efforts to instigate (which is what it is, instigating) a discussion of what we do well and, more importantly, what we do badly in the scientific community. This is something where DS people could make a big difference in the long term if I can convince them that the problems really exist and are worth fixing. In general, I’m not really inclined to take an official officer or leader position in groups like DS because those official leaders are expected to do everything, and I really don’t have either the time or the interest for that.

One of the more interesting things I hope to start in my sophomore year (next year) is to find people that are better engineers or programmers than I am (although I consider myself decent at both) to work with on an automation technology demonstration. Right now, I think it would be interesting to try to build a working fast food restaurant, similar to McDonalds, that is sufficiently automated that normal operation only requires one human overseer (I’d like it to be reliable enough that even that is unnecessary, but we can take small steps). I consider that entirely technically possible, as flipping burgers and frying strips of potato aren’t at all difficult tasks. It’s also a good way to make automation technology relevant to the general population, as everyone knows about McDonalds and most people eat fast food at least once a week. It’s also something some company, like McDonalds Corporation, might be interested in buying, which is obviously an appealing possibility. Really, though, this is more about raising awareness than anything else. I’d like to generate a little media attention for this project and get a chance to make it clear to people that we’re completely capable of automating lots of low wage service and labor jobs right now. The world and the workforce need to get ready. I expect widespread service industry automation within the next 20 years or so, regardless of my efforts. We might as well do what we can to raise awareness, and make whatever money we can, while automated service is still just taking off.

After I’ve finished my undergrad degrees, I hope to find a grad school where I can complete my physics PhD while working on a fusion reactor of whichever type seems closest to commercial implementation at the time. I’d likely try to continue such work as a post doc, as being the person that makes the final, critical breakthrough necessary to commercially build and operate fusion reactors is critical to all the rest.

From there, the possibilities diverge sharply. Assuming I fail to commercialize fusion technology (the odds are strongly against me on this one), I’ll find some other interesting tech applications to work on (automation, non-lethal weapons, spaceflight, other energy sources, etc.) and settle down with a good professorship and lab somewhere. It’d be a fairly nice existence, really. I’d go on speaking out against unconcern and mismanagement of priorities in the scientific community and have plenty of time doing all the radical things I’ve proposed like taking time off to teach high school and such. I’d make sure to be the best teacher and lecturer I could be, in any capacity, high school or college. And life would go on.

Assuming I do successfully start my own energy company designing and building fusion reactors and selling their electricity (of course I’d insist on doing all of it), things will be much more exciting. I’d start out building in the United States with whatever investment and personal funds I might have available at the time, undersell the conventional electricity utilities (which shouldn’t really be hard by then, considering how fossil fuel prices are going), and grow until I feel like I’m bringing in sufficient profit from my North American market. I’d probably keep growing in the rest of the Americas first, mainly because it’s close and easy. The really exciting part of this will be developing operations in third-world countries. I’ve been convinced for a while now that what third-world countries need most is economic growth. All of the most stable countries in the world have strong and growing economies. It can’t be a matter of sending jobs “over there”; bringing the rest of the world up while bringing the developed parts down isn’t acceptable. An energy company is perfect for accomplishing all of this. I would have to develop local infrastructure to transport my equipment and fuel, support my power plants, and take care of my local workforce (employing locals in as many ways as possible is key to all this). Initially, in many areas of the world, I would also need a great deal of security for all of these operations. So long as the profits from N. America keep coming in and growing, it would be easy to pay for massive development projects in several places at once. As I start hiring and employing locals to build and maintain all this and commerce through the area (wherever that is) increases due to the big power plant and all the new infrastructure, the area would become more stable, and quality of life would unavoidably increase. Eventually, we would also earn back far more than our initial investment in the plant and infrastructure, since we would be the first ones open for business in a new market.

Naturally, with all this money and power, I’d spend some of my time and resources on my other projects. I’d have labs working on all the things I mentioned a few paragraphs ago (automation, non-lethal weapons, spaceflight, other energy sources, etc.), and I’d definitely build and sell anything these labs came up with that was marketable. I’d work directly on these things as often as possible. My second biggest priority, after developing fusion tech, would be creating new spaceflight tech. We need to start getting people off earth. There are just too many of us, and people simply won’t listen to the rational voices telling them that (which, in an interestingly vicious cycle, discourages those voices from saying anything in the first place). A breakthrough here, allowing something amazing like travel to other planets in a reasonable amount of time (yes, I want to go faster than the speed of light; I need those gravity wave researchers to figure out how to warp space and tell me about it), is far less likely than the initial breakthrough in fusion, but it would be amazing. There are few things I could be more proud of than leading the first colonists from earth to another planet.

Here’s my insightful thought for the post: let’s say you figured out how to get to other planets and found a nice, habitable one tomorrow. You can build whatever technology gets you to that planet yourself, without help, and no one else knows about the planet. Do you tell the public about your tech and the planet and let everyone go? Do you keep this all secret and somehow limit the people that can go? If the former, how do you keep the natural human tendencies toward factionalism and pointless conflict from ruining that new planet or causing interplanetary war? If the latter, how do you chose who goes? I’ve pondered such questions extensively without coming to any conclusions. I’d be interested to hear what someone else thinks.

Cool and amusing stuff

First, my user page on Wikipedia. I think it's cool; I'll be publishing an expanded version here soon.

Second, Conservapedia. Read and be amused. In particular, read the first few of their "Examples of Bias in Wikipedia", then read my neutral-but-critical assessment of some of these examples. Also, look for all the people their admins have banned for speaking against them. I'm kind of surprised I haven't been banned yet... Some of the vandalism in the pages' histories are amusing, too. Not that I condone vandalism, but we might as well be amused if it's already happened.

Personal philosophy, part 3

On certainty:

Being “certain” about things is a concept far too many people just take for granted. Certainty is actually a complex and difficult subject, as it affects basically everything we do. Many people and organizations, to avoid discussing this complexity (since average people hate complex stuff), spend a comical amount of time trying to think up new language for sounding ever more certain, most of which ends up sounding at least a little contrived to most people.

The reality is that, for humans, there is no absolute certainty. Even in the most aware and intelligent of people, our perceptions and reasoning will always be at least slightly flawed. It’s just a fact of life. This leaves us with little choice but to figure out a way to measure and understand the, possibly small, but ever-present uncertainty in things.

Obviously, I’m interested both in finding ways to be as certain as possible about things and in figuring out when I am “certain enough”. I always start such thinking by considering how science deals with the issue of certainty. Scientists spend a great deal of time measuring things and doing calculations on those measurements. Since all of these measurements and calculations are done on numbers, “certainty” must also be “measured” as a number. Every measurement and calculation must have a value showing its certainty, or, actually, usually its uncertainty, since this is generally a smaller number and is really what the scientist is more interested in. I’ve been surprised to find that determining the uncertainty in measurements with most tools is left to the person taking the measurement; there may not always be a standard or system. There are a few guidelines, and the uncertainty for some measuring tools is well defined. The method for figuring out uncertainty in calculations, however, is very exact. Somehow, someone even came up with a set of formulas for finding uncertainty in calculations at some point.

So, how does this help me? It doesn’t, mostly. Daily decisions and personal philosophies generally can’t be condensed to numerical form, and you obviously can’t have a number that describes how certain a non-numerical idea is. I have gotten far enough in my pondering on this to conclude that the general idea behind scientific uncertainty (or at least the general idea as I see it; I’ve never heard anyone else describe it this way), may still be useful in other areas. So, I see general uncertainty like this: suppose you have a graph of the equation 1/x. It looks like a curved line going from nearly vertical at the y-axis to nearly horizontal at the x-axis. It never actually touches either axis, though, which is the key. Let’s now say that “x” is defined as “stuff I don’t know”, and that “y” is defined as “my level of understanding of stuff”. If “stuff I don’t know” is very big, “my level of understanding” gets very small, close to 0. Keep in mind, though, that it never actually equals 0. If “stuff I don’t know” gets very small, “my level of understanding” gets very big. “stuff I don’t know” can never actually be 0, though, so “my level of understanding” can never be infinite. That makes sense; we all know nothing in real life is infinite. The entire point of, well, everything we do, really, is to make “stuff we don’t know” smaller and “our level of understanding” bigger. We can keep eliminating little things we don’t know and understanding more and more, but our understanding is never infinite.

This is good enough for science because scientific measurements and calculations can be compared with previous measurements and calculations to determine whether they are more or less certain. Being more certain is good, being less certain is bad. There’s no need to talk about being “certain enough”. In real life, though, each experience is different, at least in some subtle way. We can and do gain experience and think about what is more likely to happen in a certain kind of situation, and we can act accordingly, but life will occasionally defy our expectations. Even subtle differences can have huge impacts. The bottom line, which I imagine most of you could have figured out without all the deep pondering, is that we largely make up our own meaning of “certain enough” as we go. And, for now, that will have to be good enough.

Personal philosophy, part 2

On practical pessimism:

The outlook I’ve come to call “practical pessimism” is an important part of how I look at the world. To be clear, it is not what people usually think of when they hear the word ‘pessimism’. The usual pessimist tends to go around expecting the worst of everything and being all depressed and sullen about life. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m not that at all.

I prefer to use pessimism as a tool to be more prepared for life. I try to be as aware as possible of the world, the people in it, and myself, and look for all the little, everyday things that seem like they could and, as we all know, sometimes do to go wrong. I think about the more serious stuff that might go wrong, too, but that stuff tends to be very unlikely. So, while I’m thinking about all these small things that might go wrong, I prepare for them. I do everything I can to make them less likely in the first place and to be ready if something can’t be prevented from going wrong. I lock doors, I charge my electronics like laptops and cell phones regularly, I keep miscellaneous useful things with me, I use a Google online calendar to track my events and send myself reminders of things, etc. The bottom line is that I tend to be either prepared, if something goes wrong, or pleasantly surprised, if it doesn’t. Prepared or pleasantly surprised; that seems like a good way to live to me.

On faith:

The way I look at faith has changed a lot over the years. I used to think (like most people where I grew up and quite a few everywhere) that “faith” only came in the religious variety. This led me to nearly exclusively express my early faith relative to Christianity. My family never went to church, and I got harassed a lot for it. I had it explained to me by over half a dozen kids in elementary school that I was going to go to Hell. This hostility didn’t seem like much of a reason to join a church to me (and certainly not to my parents), so instead I ended up turning against religion fairly young. This may have ended up being a fairly significant factor in the other kid’s general dislike of me from 5^th grade through 7^th. Obviously, my thoughts on faith are much more refined now.

As a general principle, I try to avoid accepting anything solely on “faith”. I like to have evidence and reasons for my ideas, and I’m not very likely to accept someone else’s idea without something a little more convincing than “well, it just makes sense, right?” As a fan of evidence and reasons in a society that values such things much less than I do overall, I end up having to find my own fairly often. A lifetime of looking for my own answers (which I’ve been doing since long before I realized it was anything special or uncommon) has led me to be extremely confident in my thoughts, plans, and perspective. If there’s anything that sets me apart from anyone else, that’s it; I may or may not have been “smarter” than the others in grade school (which is what everyone always said), but I’m certainly not particularly smarter than the average "anyone else" at UT. I just have a very good idea of what I am and am not good at.

Regarding my ‘religious’ beliefs (since that’s probably what most of you were expecting from this section, anyway): I don’t have many. I certainly don’t consider myself a member of any religious organization. I’ve been building up a list of reasons to disapprove of organized religion for my entire life, but I already explained my biggest one in great detail several months ago: organized religions naturally end up in conflict with each other. Nearly all religions on earth, and certainly all the major ones, very clearly explain in their holy books that non-believers with suffer somehow after dying, either from some kind of torture or punishment or simply from not being admitted to some kind of afterlife paradise. Conveniently, there is no way to test such a claim. What’s worse, though, is that such doctrines often lead the religious to try to convert non-believers or followers of other religions to their religion, sometimes very aggressively. If the people being converted resist, it can cause resentment and tension on an individual level, violence on a larger scale, and war on a global scale. I refuse to participate in that.

A point I often have to clarify: I am not an atheist. No, I do not consider it likely that any omnipotent being exists exactly as described my any of the major religions. However, I cannot prove absolutely that such a being does not exist. Some atheists falsely claim that they can. Also, atheism is, effectively, an organized religion. It regularly comes into conflict with other religions. Once again: I will not participate in any unnecessary aggression. If you’re interested, page back to my conflict post for a more detailed discussion of my views on conflict.

Really, most of the details of my personal life philosophies follow fairly directly from what I’ve written about so far (including my discussion of conflict). I’ll likely continue this series anyway, though. And, as always, I welcome comments and questions.

The culling of phone numbers

My old phone broke on Tuesday. There was no apparent reason or anything, it just quit working. I had insurance, so I ended up getting a better new phone, but I lost all my old numbers. All of you that have my number (its still the same; my SIM card still works and is now in my new phone) I would thoroughly appreciate a call, text, or message with your number.

And yes, I know my next post was supposed to be "Personal philosophy, part 2". Don't worry, it's coming soon.

Personal philosophy, part 1

Other than my post on conflict, I realize that my personal thoughts are largely scattered throughout my posts and that it takes a lot of reading to find them, so I’ve decided to condense them in a series of no-events, personal-thoughts-only posts. This is the first of several such posts (I haven’t decided how many I’ll write yet).

On Science:

My philosophy on science has largely come together since I started taking classes at UT. I find it extremely interesting that I have found more specialties in physics that I am not interested in practicing than that I am interested in. This is because I feel very strongly that any work I do must have a strong potential to cause a tangible benefit for other people in the near future.

It is important to note that this works only because I firmly believe that we already have all the theoretical understanding we need to solve nearly all of the major technology-related problems we currently face; we're just not using that knowledge to its full potential due to bureaucracy, regulation, lack of funding, lack of interest, or other non-scientific reasons.

I have heard many times since my arrival at UT the argument of the theorists and the experimentalists working on areas that won’t yield any tangible results for a long time: we can’t know now how those things will be beneficial in the future. Entirely true. I’m not arguing that we should have no theorists and particle physicists and such. This is, first and foremost, the rationale for my own career plans. I’ve had people tell me that wanting to work on applying the physics I will learn to making new technologies that make life better makes me an engineer, not a physicist. Fine. I think it’s kind of pointless to worry much about the distinction. I do, however, believe that we have a responsibility, as scientists, engineers, and people of technical ability in general, to apply our knowledge and skills toward solving problems that exist here and now before worrying about ideas that might or might not someday be useful. Working on current issues first is desirable for a lot of reasons. Obviously, making life better has to be the ultimate purpose of all science and technology. This has the secondary effect that, when quality of life increases, the productivity of the population in question increases. There are currently billions of people living in terrible conditions, who can’t do much to further science or help others because they have enough to worry about just to survive. Finding ways to bring resources, infrastructure, medicine, and education to these people will have the long term result that they will be more productive and will contribute to developing faster as a species later on. Helping people isn’t good just for abstract, feel-good reasons, it yields real benefits for all of us in the long run. In short, we need to put people before ideas.

On Politics:

Similarly to the way that I can’t simply be called a ‘physicist’ or ‘engineer’, I can’t simply be called a ‘Democrat’ or ‘Republican’. I defy labels in a lot of ways, really. My politics, specifically, don’t tend to line up with the opinions of either party. One of my most basic political thoughts is that the two party system is highly inefficient. It’s basically a ‘moderation through conflict’ method; we send a roughly even number of Democrats and Republicans to Congress and to most other national and state offices (really, it comes fairly close on average), and they fight it out to find moderate solutions to our nation’s and states’ problems. Fighting to reach moderation is inefficient, and the details of the ‘solutions’ reached are often seriously flawed. I have to admit that I don’t really know how to fix this in general. One would hope that our politicians are at least expressing their real, thought-out beliefs, and not just their party’s policies. We can (and I do) keep encouraging logical, moderate policies and solutions on an individual level; such an effort, if maintained, must have an impact at some point. There are, however, some specific things we can do to reach moderation more quickly in politics right now:

First, we need to change the rules of Congress. Currently, the Constitution says that each “House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings” (Art. I, Sec. V, Clause II). Members of the House of Representatives may, then, introduce bills that say basically whatever that representative wants. They often include provisions for the government to spend money in the districts of other representatives whose support the bill’s author(s) need to pass the bill. This is reason for what people call “pork barrel spending”, which all politicians claim to oppose, but they all go on using this technique to pass their legislation, anyway. I find this to be a fascinating example of a political ‘check’ that was somehow left out of the Constitution. We need new rules in Congress that require that it only votes on individual provisions, not the packages of unrelated stuff that most bills become. This would very likely lead to an immediate end of nearly all of the “pork barrel spending” I mentioned earlier, since these spending provisions, by themselves, would not be supported by anyone other than the representative whose district would benefit.

Second, we need to eliminate the Electoral College and have standardized, nationalized presidential elections. The Electoral College made sense at the time the constitution was written, but we are a more united nation with more knowledge and awareness of the candidates and political process now than we were 200 years ago. Each individual vote will be more meaningful, and irregularities like the winner in the Electoral College not really winning the most votes (which has happened 4 times, in 1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000) would just not happen because the Electoral College would simply not exist. The candidate that received the most votes would win, plain and simple. There would also not be complications like candidates from smaller parties not being able to get their name on the ballot in some states (this happens fairly regularly; you just don’t hear about it because no one cares about the minor candidates for whom this is a problem).

An Excellent Dilemma

Since my last post, I have taken my finals, gotten straight A’s, gone home for the holiday break, returned to Austin, and had my first day of class. The dilemma is this: Getting the A’s was very cool, especially since I know I scraped by fairly close to the bar on a few; my holiday break was just generally excellent; and my first day of classes was one of the best first days of anything I can remember. I can’t decide which of these activities/accomplishments was the coolest. Ahhh… Sorry, I can’t help taking a moment to just sit back and bask in the awesomeness.

My exams, as a whole, were not a particularly big deal. I did not wear myself out studying for them or rereading entire books or going without sleep or any of the things college students do to themselves during exam time. My friends back home, naturally, won’t be surprised by any of this, but all the UT people should take the hint: quit doing all that stuff to yourselves. It doesn’t really help! Go to review sessions, study in moderation, then relax and get plenty of sleep right before the exams themselves. It works.

Spending three weeks at home over the holidays must be the most relaxing, makes-a-person-feel-good-about-life kind of thing I have ever done. I had to make the rounds visiting everyone at the high school (principal, counselor, old teachers, band director, etc.) and the family I worked for as a volunteer tutor last year, and, of course, I had to spend as much time as possible with old friends. It was great.

More on the friends part: So, I ended up having three big party-type-gatherings over the break. A friend from high school that’s been in basic training for the Army was back for two weeks over the break, so he had the same feeling I did, that he needed to see everyone as much as possible. His brother, who lives and works in A&M and is only a year older, was also back, so we were all working to get everyone together while we were back. The first gathering was an attempt to have a now-old-fashioned LAN party at my place, a few days before Christmas. Of course, I say attempt and old-fashioned because I felt like this didn’t work too well. Last year, we centered most of these gatherings around playing Halo 2 and similar games on networked original Xboxes. The original Xbox had underwhelming graphics and too many buttons that you had to use your right thumb to press, but it was extremely straightforward to network and set up. The Xbox 360 is an entirely different story. It is designed to work best when left in one place, always with the same controllers, and connected to the Internet. The gamer then either pays a subscription or at least gets regularly coerced to buy game upgrades or other digital trinkets while playing over “Xbox Live”, Microsoft’s online Xbox gaming network. It is not designed to work well in a local area network. The controllers are mostly wireless and, therefore, a pain (although I found a clever way to “synchronize” them to their 360 fairly quickly that none of the actual 360 owners present had thought of), all the boxes have to be restarted if one goes offline, the profiles are not game specific, and creating one is non-intuitive. In general, I thought it was a mess, but some of the guys had fun. I mainly found another reason to hate Microsoft.

Also at that gathering, I was informed by a friend of a friend of a friend who ended up there that ‘being smart’ is pointless because someone else can do it and because we already have Bill Gates; “What, are you going to be richer than he is?” he says, or something like that. I don’t even know how to begin to refute this non-argument, and at the time I didn’t really bother. This was obviously not the kind of person who would have really understood, anyway. On the plus side, I will definitely not be taking people like this with me when I invent a new propulsion system that can take us to other habitable planets outside the solar system, put together a colonization group of the world’s best, brightest, and most ambitious, and leave. In fact, people like this may lead me to happen to not leave any designs or info about this new propulsion system on earth when I leave… This kind of thought and the many problems that naturally go with it have occupied many hours of my thoughts over the last two years or so, and even more recently.

Christmas for me was fairly quiet and relaxed. I went to Dallas with Sara (my little sister), spent an afternoon with Dad, and got presents from him on Christmas Eve. On Christmas Day, we had the usual opening of under-the-tree presents and Christmas dinner and such. Mom came up with some interesting trinkets to get me, like a remote-controlled helicopter that is too small to fly controllably and a Tom-Tom, one of those talking navigation systems. I also got a book and a President Bush calendar, which is both scary and funny all at once (he says and does some frighteningly stupid stuff).

Our next large gathering was at the brothers’ house on New Year’s Eve. That was crazy, certainly crazier than most of the boozed-up parties one hears so much about in Austin, and with the free bonus that we can all remember it fairly clearly. I completely don’t understand peoples’ desire to go to parties and do miscellaneous things that they will forget later. Some even talk about the forgetting-it-all part as a benefit; I don’t get it, but that’s completely off the point. Anyway, we had several dozen ‘artillery shells’ or ‘mortars’, the big fireworks that launch out of a tube, normally, at least, and explode in big colored sparks at twenty or thirty feet high. I had to take charge of most of these and protect them from misuse, as someone near the beginning got the brilliant idea to light one of these and just toss it in the air to see what would happen. It ended up falling on the ground and exploding there, creating about 8 small grass fires that we had to quickly stomp out. Apparently not realizing that either that this was dangerous or that the ground explosions were less impressive, anyway, other people proceeded to do this 6 or 7 more times throughout the evening, so I had to guard the last few shells and launch them properly near the end. We also had about 300 bottle rockets, which, for reasons that are now quite obvious to me, are going to be illegal starting this summer. We launched about 200 of them that evening. Without cleaning up, either; you should have seen their yard after we were done. Anyway, most of these were not launched in an even remotely safe manner; most were just lit and thrown somewhere, at which point they might or might not launch somewhere else and explode. Over half of us got hit at some point by one of these rockets; I took two. I was hit in the leg by one of the first rockets of the evening (the first injury of the evening; I still have a cut in my right thigh from it). I later caught a rocket in the chest right as it exploded; it didn’t hurt at all, but it did catch my shirt on fire. Yeah, that’s right, my shirt was on fire! It ended up badly singed with a big hole right in the middle. My undershirt and jacket were singed, too. This was, by far, the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me at a party. We concluded this party by spending about two hours at IHOP, from 2 to about 4 in the morning, where several of the guys made up stories about things that didn’t happen between me and the girl I invited to this gathering, who I had thankfully taken home before going to IHOP. Remember, the flaming shirt was the highlight of the evening; this would definitely not have been the case if… well… you get the idea.

My final large gathering of the break was this massive, 12 hour monster of a night. Yeah, I’m not kidding, it went on for 12 hours! I started out by having dinner with my Army friend and two girls from the New Year’s party (neither was the girl I had invited; I saw her again once after New Year’s, but she got sick and had to work too much after that for us to see each other any more before I left). We then went to the latest Resident Evil movie, which, I guess, was decent enough. Expectations were low to begin with. I mean, it’s a movie about a virus turning everyone into zombies that eat normal people; there are only so many ways to kill a zombie, and only so many ways a zombie can kill a person, and most have already been done. That’s about all there was to it. After that, Army friend and I went to one of the guy’s houses and spent the rest of the night playing Halo 3 on the previously-ranted-about 360s. It was a lot easier with only 6-8 people playing on two boxes; we’d been trying to have 10-12 people play on three boxes before.

After that, the break passed fairly quietly, as it already had between gatherings. I spent far too much time sitting around playing the new video games I got for Christmas. I also watched the New Hampshire presidential debates with Mom and ended up walking away from the Democrats’ half out of mental exhaustion. Even I, apparently, can only take so many hours of Republican bickering and Democrat non-answers. I came away from the whole thing liking all of the candidates less.

I arrived back in Austin last Thursday and, once again, mostly just chilled for a couple days. It was actually kind of weird to be back here at first, but I’m definitely glad to be here now.

And today was the first day of class for the new semester. And it was pretty much awesome. I didn’t have to get up until after 8 (yes!) because my first class isn’t until 10. Then I have two back-to-back classes before lunch, US history and physics, and two more after, Calculus and programming. I also had my first meeting with the physics department chairman for our “Freshman Research Initiative (FRI) Physics Research Stream”, which basically means that I get to have real professors teach my lab class instead of a vastly sub-par TA. And I get to drop subtle (or, eventually, less subtle) hints about the failings of freshman physical mechanics lab classes. I doubt it will do any good, but I have to try. I at least need to make sure he actually reads the lab manual, which is right down there with the worst literature ever. Throughout, I ran into lots of old friends, told all of the stories I just recounted, and even made a few new friends. After all, that’s what first days are for.

For anyone looking for insights this time around, think back to my friend of a friend of a friend who thinks that “someone else can be smart, so I doesn’t have to, and what’s the point, anyway, if I don’t get obscenely rich for it?” Do any of you even know of effective ways to communicate with such a person? Even better, how can we convince them that living with this kind of mentality is one of the best ways around to destroy society and civilization? I would really love to be able to convince people to not think like this, but nothing I have tried has ever worked, which is why I didn’t even bother this time. Any ideas?

Fun things like exams and dead people

I’ve definitely stayed busy in the month that I haven’t updated. This past weekend was my first chance to slow down in a while.

Classes ended last Friday. Even some of those were optional; I didn’t have to do to calculus or Java Programming. We had our last ‘midterms’ (it seems funny to call them that this late in the semester, but all of our non-final exams are apparently midterms) last Wednesday in physics and calculus. I got about 86% on both, which was well above the average and among the highest scores on both tests.

My physics lab ended Thanksgiving week, which was extremely nice. I never have to write a mechanics lab report again! Rejoice!

My first final is tomorrow, in calculus. My last, chemistry, is next Monday, and I plan to leave for the holiday that Tuesday (1 week!). I hope everyone else is doing well on finals and such.

So, stuff I’ve been doing:

The weekend before Thanksgiving, I went to College Station to see some high school friends. I stayed with them that Friday and Saturday night. It was fun; these guys are quite amusingly random and vulgar and such, and they have some interesting friends. Their apartment is awesome, in the sense that it has random crap like aluminum cans and video game cases and big cardboard advertising-stand-type-things for video games everywhere. It’s the perfect metaphor for how these guys live life. The drive to and from College Station reminds me of home a little; I took Highway 79, which is just a small, low traffic rural highway through a bunch of the small towns between I 35 and Bryan. Also, all my Longhorn friends will be amused to know that these guys verified that all of the amazingly dumb stuff we always say about A&M people is completely accurate. We apparently aren’t exaggerating at all. Although, I was kind of disappointed that I didn’t get tackled for walking on the grass on campus.

I only had a couple classes that week. Monday I had my usual schedule, including the last of my lab (which is over now! Celebrate!). Tuesday I had a chemistry midterm that a lot of us didn’t really have to take. I explained this to most of the people there: our chemistry professor drops one midterm grade. This was the last midterm, so anyone who had As on both of the earlier ones had no reason to take it. I even found a guy who had 100% on both of the first two and took this one anyway. The efficient part of my brain was screaming at me the whole time I was there. As fate would have it, though, I ended up beating one of my older scores by a couple points.

I had been planning for over a week to skip two of my classes that Wednesday. It was fun to tell people about how I was going to skip class, so I was disappointed when they both got canceled. I spent most of that day driving home, which is always kind of boring.

Thursday I had my first (yes, meaning of more than one) Thanksgiving dinner with friends in Tom Bean. It was very different to have Thanksgiving with someone other than family, but it was also lots of fun. That evening I tried and largely failed to gather people for video gaming; we only got one console, so a few of us played that and the others played WOW (which is a cultural phenomenon everyone should know about; Google it) on their laptops through my laggy satellite internet. Yeah, they’re addicted. Friday I relaxed a lot and saw Enchanted (which was extremely funny) with Mom and Sara before hanging out with some of the guys some more. We hung out at IHOP drinking hot chocolate and such for over an hour after watching Beowulf (which was actually digitally animated, extremely well, but was otherwise underwhelming).

Saturday I had my second Thanksgiving dinner, this time at home. It was also very good. We had all the usual stuff like a turkey and Mom’s really awesome gravy and rolls and cranberries and such. I kept some leftover rolls to take back with me. I had to go back to doing useful stuff like laundry that evening, though, since I left Sunday morning.

The trip back on Sunday was interesting. I ended up moving a friend to College Station to live with the friends I mentioned earlier. The actual drive down was largely uneventful. I took I 45 to College Station, so the traffic was light. 35 was apparently awful, so that worked well. I also got to see a more rural part of the hill country, as 45 doesn’t have all the midsize towns 35 does. I ended up driving about one and a half hours longer than I would have if I taken 35 straight down and had no traffic, but the weather and traffic on 35 were bad and I got to help a friend while I avoided that, so it’s all good.

The week after that, I jumped right back into the usual routine for two more weeks (I had never thought about the fact that there are only two weeks of class left after Thanksgiving in college; weird). Our chemistry classes wound down fast and the last two last week were largely pointless. Java programming was still interesting, mostly because the last assignment was fun. I got to program wolves that kill lions, tigers, bears, and stones. Very cool. No, you’re not supposed to understand, just agree.

The last two weekends I had some interesting party-type events. Last weekend my TA for Research Methods invited me to her birthday party at the Cheesecake Factory. It was hard to find, and we had to wait a while because we had a big group and they were packed, but the food was naturally good and the company was excellent. I only knew the TA when I got there, but I met and talked a lot with several of her friends, so that was fun. I also got cheesecake, some of which I kept and took back to the dorm. Monday morning that cheesecake made the best breakfast I have ever eaten. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that awake at 8 in the morning. Last weekend, I went to the Dean’s Scholars’ Holiday-Dinner-that-can’t-be-called-a-“Christmas”-dinner. Who knew “Christmas” was not politically correct. Whatever. Anyway, I drove some people to that on Saturday evening. We had awesome music, decent food, good people and conversation, and it was generally a good time. I ended up not having to clean anything, even though I signed up to, because we have dutiful people that clean without being asked to. Only in an honors program. But, that’s cool. I ended up making two trips taking people back to campus since several ride-givers left without full carloads before the party had broken up. I learned, while hanging out with some late-staying second years between giving rides, that they generally like the leader of the Research Methods class (which all DSers take), Dr. Laude. You remember, the amusing guy that compared me to William F. Buckley, the failed politician and mediocre author, in an office hours meeting? I found this highly interesting, since I’m fairly sure most of my year is still scared of him. They take him too seriously, I think. He needs to be laughed at when he makes fun of you, that’s all.

So now I’ve spent a weekend relaxing and have done a little work and studying the last two days. This is where the dead people come in. You see, I finished the semester with several things left to do in Research Methods: three skill modules and an ‘inquiry’ (translated: I have to turn in 5+ pages of stuff that sound like a research paper). The inquiry is over criminals executed in Texas since 1982. Their info and final statements are saved online, and we have to read them and write something interesting about them. I read all 405 on my own (some people formed groups). That was a really fascinating and depressing sort of thing to do. It was interesting to see what these people had to say and think about what I would say in their place, knowing I would be executed immediately after. I was disturbed by the number of people that did not leave a statement; if I was about to be executed, that statement would mean everything to me. That will probably be the main thing I write about. Seriously though, if you ever feel like you need to get really depressed and hate life, read about those people. Sit for about and hour and read their statements and tell me then that we should still have state sponsored killing. Let me be clear: everything related to those poor people is wrong: the ways the victims were tortured, raped, and killed; the fact that the offenders spend years fighting the system with poor educations and bad public defenders (come on, these guys can’t afford good lawyers), only to die at the end; the fact that some of those 405 people executed must have been innocent, but that now we’ll never know for sure; and the fact that so many families, of victims and offenders, have been ruined by the whole ordeal. It’s all wrong. We can stop at least part of the cycle; killing those criminals does not save us money, does not deter other criminals (violent crimes overall have occurred at roughly the same rate nationwide for decades), and does not bring back the victims. Some of the people we execute will be innocent, as the system is very far from perfect. Bottom line: there is no reason for the state to execute anyone. This must stop.

Averageness, homework, and the Universe

It’s been long enough since Capitol BEST that I’m starting to get over the feeling that I have to catch up on the homework I was putting off to do stuff over the weekends. Three full weekends in a row is too many.

Last week was fairly average. I spent most of it doing homework. Tuesday was kind of interesting because Dad was in Austin interviewing engineering students for co-op positions. We had dinner that night and lunch on Wednesday before he left. The way he described the interviews was kind of funny; for example, some of the applicants apparently didn’t read the job description. They didn’t even know how long the job was supposed to last.

I did get two exams back last week. 100% in calculus and 91% in chemistry. I’ll take it.

Last weekend I tried and failed to finish my second inquiry for my Research Methods class. I’ve decided to measure the voltage of my laptop battery as it runs and figure out why the software battery meter and “time left” indicator seem to always be wrong. The problem is that I can’t reach the terminals. They’re about 2 mm wide and are down inside little plastic slots only about 4 mm wide. And my voltmeter’s probes are about 5 mm wide. This is ok, though, because our professor has officially declared that we can basically have as long an extension on this project as we need as long as we turn in a decent inquiry write-up. My new plan is to receive the second battery I ordered over the weekend and open it up to use the terminals on the cells inside. That should be more interesting, anyway.

While I’m on the subject, I had a very interesting meeting with the Research Methods professor Sunday evening. His name is David Laude; he’s a chemistry professor and the “Associate Dean of the College of Natural Sciences”. He’s also extremely cynical, sarcastic, and just generally funny. I hate to disappoint, but he doesn’t think I could ever get elected president. The interesting part about that is why he thinks so; I don’t think I could ever be elected to anything, either. Society is just not ready for a moderate, independent, non-religious physicist/engineer to be a politician. But his reasoning was that I don’t seem average enough and do seem too confident. That one threw me off, since politicians clearly have to be extremely confident. After all, they spend every election season going around explaining why they are better people than their opponents. One of his other entertaining thoughts was his opinion that “procrastination is an admirable trait”. Yeah, it was an extremely amusing 20 minutes. Let’s see, he also called me a “know-it-all” and said that I encourage ridicule and combativeness because I seem so confident and self-assured. I hadn’t heard anything like that in years. Of course, I guess my friends from Tom Bean just got tired of saying it at some point, didn’t you? So there you have it, the “Associate Dean of the College of Natural Sciences”. Feel free at this point to draw any conclusions you like.

We had yet another physics discussion on Monday. More people were there than usual because they were all worried about the exam coming up on Wednesday (which was earlier tonight, actually). There was a guy there that was, rather interestingly, completely unable to visualize the motion of a yo-yo. We had a problem about the velocity of a really large yo-yo on last week’s homework that we were trying to figure out. He kept trying to argue that the center of rotation was at the edge of the wider part of the yo-yo instead of the in the middle. Seriously, how does someone not remember how a yo-yo works?

Last night was really entertaining. I went to my first “skill module” for the Research Methods class. This involved gathering with a group of about 15 other people in the class to listen to one of the TAs talk about astronomy. It was actually really amusing; she was really energetic about her galaxies and red shifts and dark matter and such. It’s really a shame I can’t recreate any of her gestures. She also used a bunch of really hilarious metaphors for things and, between her choices of topics and some helpful questions from me, we came to such amusing conclusions as: “Everything we know about everything may be wrong” “Everything is going to get eaten and die” and “We are just a peanut in the cosmic circus”. Just awesome.

Earlier today I had a Java programming exam in class (which was just easy), and tonight I had the dreaded physics exam. I really don’t know why everyone was so worried; we already know that the professor makes the exams a lot easier than the homework and actually even reuses some homework questions. I was finished in about an hour; we were given two.

One of my recurring thoughts in recent weeks has been over the value of “what if” questions and the rather clumsy opinion I explained to some of my old BEST team a year or two ago. I said, at the time, that all “what if” questions were useless, which even the official freshman slacker of the team could tell was wrong. This thought seems to tie in somewhat to my thoughts on theoretical science and such, so it’s worth clarifying. My refined opinion: “What could have been” ponderings are still definitely useless. We cannot travel back in time to ever really know “what could/might have been”, so worrying about it at all is a waste of time. Considering what might happen in the future, however, is entirely worthwhile. This is one of the better ways to be prepared for that future. Observing past events and patterns to make plans and preparations for the future is entirely worthwhile, too. Thinking about the past only for the sake of wishing it had been different, though, is not. Thinking about “what if”s regarding the present that could never be real is also a waste. If a situation is not the way you want it, you should find ways to change it. Once you establish that a given option is not possible, however, let it go and move on to other ideas.

I’m planning to go home for Thanksgiving in a few weeks. I may also go to College Station to see some friends the weekend before, homework permitting. It’s been nice to actually stay in touch with my high school friends; I was worried that we might lose contact just like I have with so many other old groups. It hasn’t happened, though. Gentry, LB, and I keep each other’s Facebook walls filled with comments about our activities, thoughts, or whatever randomly happens to come to mind. Overall this semester, I think I’ve either seen or talked to more than 20 old friends from high school. Not bad.

Capitol BEST

For anyone not familiar with BEST, my last post includes a summary of what the competition is about and my various exploits on the Tom Bean High School and Middle School teams.

This year’s game was fairly straight forward. The teams had to drive their machine from their starting corner of the field up on to a raised platform using a ramp. The outer, lower part of the field and the ramps were only wide enough for one machine at a time to pass any particular point. On the platform, there was room for all of the machines. They had to grab small cardboard boxes and 20 oz. bottles filled with sand from a 2 ft. square in the middle and more boxes from the corners. If they collected and scored with the correct combinations of colored boxes and bottles, they got bonus points worth a lot more than any single score. Bottles were worth the most points for any single item. After grabbing stuff, the teams had to drive down another ramp and to the far edge of the lower field to drop their stuff and score.

It was extremely different working on the staff rather than on a team this year. First, there was no great pressure to come up with awesome design ideas or to memorize the rules within 48 hours after kickoff, which was, to some extent, a relief. There was some pressure to look and sound confident and authoritative, or at least there would have been if those things didn’t come completely naturally to me.

Second, I started out not knowing anyone. I felt like it was an accomplishment to know half of the crew’s names after the first evening of setting up for kickoff. Of course, I’ve been doing lots of name-learning down here.

All of my loyal readers will already be familiar with the earlier events, so I’ll jump right in to the preparation for Contest Day. I arrived at Akins High School at around 5:45 Friday evening. I had been stick in rush hour traffic for about an hour (fancy that, stuck in rush hour during rush hour. Honestly, how do I not think of this stuff?) and was expecting everyone and all the stuff to already be there, since Greg (Greg Young, Capitol BEST director) had asked us to be there at 5. He apparently hadn’t thought about the traffic, either, as he arrived with the truck full of stuff about 15 minutes after I did. Most of the setting-up, preparing the field, arranging tables in the pit, checking in the teams, checking machines, and such only took about three hours. The next five and a half hours were spent mostly on setting up the wiring for the field scoring, tiebreaker system, and the wireless network for the computers. We ran into an amazing array of problems including a wireless camera that completely jammed the network, software glitches, more software glitches, and unreliable tiebreakers. The last one we never fully worked out, partially because the head referee and the head scorer were not coordinating very well and the scoring program wasn’t always ready for the next match when it started. That completely threw off the tiebreaker system. The rest, though, we finally got working by about 8 Saturday morning. We were close at 2:30 that morning, when we accidentally tripped an alarm the teacher escorting us forgot to turn off. The cops insisted that if we couldn’t contact the principal (and of course, we couldn’t), we had to leave and come back after 6. I never understood what that accomplished.

Compared to most places I had been to for BEST contests, the Akins HS gym building was fairly small. It only had one small hallway in the front of the building, concessions, restrooms, the gym itself, and a back hallway. The volunteers’ hospitality rooms had to be in another building to the side. The school in general was typical of high schools in the Austin area: it had several separate buildings arranged in a loose ring around a central courtyard-like area just about big enough to enclose TBHS. It’s an amusing design. From the size of it, I hope the students at these schools get more than 4 minutes to get from one class to another; that was the passing period back home, and it was only barely enough even in our tiny school.

I got about two hours of sleep between being kicked out and coming back for the competition on Saturday. Getting that little sleep is pointless; I felt sleepier at 6 that I had at 2. Once again, I worked mostly on finishing the networking and such. We finally had most of it working by 8, which, conveniently, was when drivers’ meetings and such started. This, like all of the meetings and presentations held by the staff, was a lot lower-key than I was used to. I was used to Ted and Steve and the cheerful, upbeat style they brought to everything they did. I was used to being greeted at my drivers’ meetings by the official head referee and kit and RC experts, all of whom were clearly extremely confident and capable and all had many years of experience even during my first year, 8 years ago.

Next we had the opening of the game and a skit by the Akins HS drama club, which was really cheesy, and not even in a particularly funny way (I hadn’t known that was possible). It got good, though, when the game started. I was officially in charge of the “red” corner of the field, which didn’t really mean that much. All of the refs roamed wherever the action was fairly freely. The first few games all had really low scores. I would guess that a full half of all scores made overall during the day were either “0”s or “1”s, since the teams officially got one point for tripping the tiebreaker. For reference, the lowest other score possible was 5 points, and including bonus points, it ramped up quickly from there. This meant that most people didn’t even notice that our tiebreakers were also only working properly about half of the time, which was definitely convenient for us. There were several other problems during the first half of the day or so: several teams were not ready when the head ref started the match, since he didn’t give any warning and didn’t usually even check all of the drivers or other refs for confirmation. This meant we ended up having to give lots of 20 second penalties for drivers having to turn on their machines after the whistle or something like that. I was kind of surprised at how many drivers managed to jump their machines over the edge of the field as they were starting out. I think I had about three of those in my corner throughout the day.

During the second half of the prelims, things started hitting the fan a little harder. I had to disqualify several scores made after the buzzer that ends the round or that were not completely in the scoring area. Two of my teams jumped the edge during this half; the rules say we have to disqualify them from that match if the leave the field, even if they could get back in. My corner also started having radio problems. In order to minimize interference, all BEST hubs now have special field radio systems. The teams have to turn in their transmitter crystals, rendering them powerless to do anything without a direct cable connection. The teams have to use our receiver boxes and plug in to our transmitters on the field. Our radios are not flawless, however, so we have to check on every accusation every team makes that our system has a problem. 90% of the time or more, the team just has a mechanical problem. At least once during the prelims, though, my red radio system did indeed stop working. When Greg was called over to decide what to do, I intercepted him and explained to him that “If it’s our radio problem, we run the match again, right?” in that tone that said that this was not really a question. That had always been the policy back home, and I completely believed both that it was a good policy and that our radio had definitely stopped working during that match. I was completely surprised that Greg seemed to be seriously considering to just continuing the game without worrying about it, which I was fully prepared to fight. That just wasn’t right. He decided to give that team another chance, though, so I found them and brought them back to the field. After we got them ready for their make-up run, we found that they also had a mechanical problem: one of their motors could not move for some reason. I could hear it buzzing as they tried to move it. Rather unwisely, the driver started arguing with me and Greg that the radio was still not working. By then, we had wasted enough time and had to send them on their way. It was a funny sort of coincidence, that they had both radio and mechanical problems at the same time. We at least tried to do the right thing. A few rounds later, another team decided to mess with us and our radio problems. They somehow made it look like their machine was not receiving a radio signal, even though we tested the receiver and found no problems. The driver then pulled his team’s tether cable (the wired drive system for teams to use in the pit area at contest) out of his pocket right after the game and drove the machine around. I don’t know how or why they made their machine seem to not work. In keeping with doing the right thing, I promptly ordered them off the field.

By the semifinals, the problem frequency had gone down considerably and the game got a whole lot more interesting. The best machine was a quick, single-object grabbing machine with a box to hold stuff in that had really good drivers. During the prelims, other teams had sometimes blocked them from getting to their scoring area (since the lower part of the field was too narrow to get around a properly placed machine and attacking such a machine was a disqualification offense). The problem with this strategy was that it kept the team doing the blocking from scoring any points. And, overall, it didn’t work; this team still had the highest prelim average, almost double the second place score. The second and third place teams both tried to grab all or at least many of the bottles (the high-point objects) at once. This gave them really high scores in any match where they actually pulled it off, but they could only get to the center before the other machines and successfully grab and score several bottles about once in three matches. They also came really close to getting interference penalties several times; once during the prelims, I actually had to take a driver’s transmitter and disqualify him from a match for knocking some bottles out of another machine’s grip, which is seriously bad sportsmanship. During one of the semifinal rounds, I had to release a slight tangle between these two mass-bottle-grabbing machines.

There was one particularly memorable moment in the first round of the semifinals. The team with the quick, well driven machine, Liberal Arts and Sciences Academy, or LASA, had already made a big score. With about thirty seconds to go, they were on the lower field between one of the mass-bottle-grabbers and that machine’s scoring area. They had a perfect chance to block another machine, get a little payback for the blocking they had suffered from earlier. Instead, the LASA driver chose to back his machine all the way into the closest starting corner and let the bottle-grabber go by. They ended up getting to their scoring bin with about 5 seconds left and weren’t able to drop anything before the buzzer. I was amazed at the graciousness of the LASA driver, and absolutely had to shake his hand after that match. He explained that he refused to use the same cheap tactics the fatalist teams had used against his team earlier. He didn’t elaborate on the fact that the bottle-grabber did not have enough time to score, anyway. That action, backing away and letting this machine at least have a chance to score really impressed me. It was both an amazingly sporting gesture and a justifiable tactical decision, since LASA’s earlier score earned much more points than the bottle-grabber could have gotten and they didn’t have good odds of making that score in the time left, anyway. This is the ideal I would look for if I were still in BEST competitions: be sporting, be generous, and still win. An awesome combination.

LASA did end up winning in the end. The two bottle-grabbers each only got one big score during the three final matches, just like I predicted from their success rate during the prelims. LASA, however, was able to maneuver around them as they fought for position over the bottles and pick out several boxes and a couple bottles of their own. It was exactly the right approach. They also ended up winning the BEST award, as they had one of the biggest teams there and therefore had more than enough people to compete well in all the BEST award captions (see the BEST web page for the details). The short explanation is that the BEST award encompasses a bunch of less important stuff that doesn’t directly involve building or running the machine. Because it involves more students with more diverse abilities, though, the national BEST organization decided a couple years before my first contest that it should take precedence over the machines’ game award. I have never agreed with this; without the machines, there would be nothing for the notebook writers or the presentation speakers to do. I do understand their reasoning, though, and at least one game winner always goes on to state from every hub, so I don’t fight it too hard. As it turned out at Capitol BEST this year, they got to send five teams to Texas BEST. Since LASA and one of the bottle-grabbing teams both got BEST awards and qualified for state with those, the game awards went to the other two finalist teams and all four finalist teams go to advance, along with one other that placed 3^rd in the BEST award. Once again, check the website if you care about the details of how this all works.

I have decided that I have to be more forward about organizing the field staff next year. I figured I might as well mostly stay quiet and see how things went my first year. In the process, I found several problems. The head ref didn’t reliably check for readiness until the semifinals, after I had been making a point to make a visible thumbs-up signal that my red team was ready for several of the last few prelim matches. He also didn’t wait for the scorer to reset the software and be ready for the next match, which led to the tiebreaker system not working any more than half of the time. The teams didn’t seem to all understand our plan for the flow of the game, which I think was mostly because they didn’t get a strong introduction and clear instructions at the beginning of the day. All of this is stuff I can fix next year.

Even with all the problems and negative calls I had to make, I thoroughly enjoyed the game. There are few places I would rather be than watching a bunch of cobbled together duct-tape and plywood tinker- toys lurch around the field. There’s a certain beauty in watching six weeks of hard work in action. It probably helps a lot that I know exactly how hard those kids worked on those contraptions. I also know that somewhere amongst all those proud designers, builders, and drivers, there had to be at least one who had the best day of his senior year right there at Capitol BEST. And I am extremely proud to have been a part of it.

BEST Robotics

BEST is a high school robotics competition founded in Sherman, Texas about 15 years ago by two engineers at Texas Instruments, Ted Mahler and Steve Marum. I happen to know both of these guys; they work with my mom and I competed in their contest for seven years. They’re two of the most awesome people you could ever meet. BEST is an acronym for Boosting Engineering, Science, and Technology. It really was clever at the time the contest was founded; it comes from the era before we reached acronym saturation and they all just started sounding dumb. The name, though, is insignificant next to the fact that the contest is really awesome. BEST is now a national organization with three large state or multi-state competitions and dozens of local hub competitions. Unfortunately for the national organization, Ted and Steve have opted to go on running their smaller local contest, North Texas BEST. For seven years, though, that didn’t make any difference to me; I had always gotten to compete in the best hub, even if I didn’t know it yet.

In the BEST contests, teams from high schools within the hub’s local area gather every fall, usually in September, to see that season’s game. Each game is different; some past games involved picking up and moving rings of PVC pipe, flipping switches, grabbing balloons, or hanging bandanas on clothes lines. Some rules and the allowed building materials, however, say fairly similar: the machines are always restricted to be less than two feet long, wide, or tall, and less than 24 pounds, and the main materials are always PVC pipe, plywood, and 1x4. The teams always get four motors, three servos, and a four-channel transmitter to control it all.

The teams from Tom Bean were, at least for my first few years, never particularly good. Both the middle school and high school teams could score points my 6^th grade year, but that was about it. It went downhill from there for the next four years. That was until we got a new math teacher and coach my sophomore year. She came from a school that had done fairly well in BEST in recent years, in no small part because she was willing to put lots of time and effort into the team. She did the same at Tom Bean, and from my freshman year to my sophomore year we went from scoring 0 points and finishing last to scoring lots of points and finishing 8^th of 22. That was huge. More of the same the next year, when we moved up to 5^th. My senior year, the odds would have seemed to be against us, as more than half of the team had graduated the previous spring. Regardless, though, I was really determined to at least have the best machine and best drivers ever for my final year in the contest. The game that year was the one about hanging bandanas. It was really fairly complicated; there were four quadrants of the field and a really tall center section in which to hang these bandanas. There were also neutral bandanas that could be taken down for additional points. There were also several ways to get bonus points, such as by both hanging and picking bandanas or by hanging in several quadrants. Getting these bonuses was our (read: my) strategy, although I had to fight like mad to convince the team that strategy could work. It felt really good later when Ted Mahler was quoted in the paper complementing us on knowing the rules and planning well. I also had to fight like mad to convince both the team and our coach that my extra simple design would work; everyone else wanted to actively grab bandanas, while I only wanted to poke them with a rubber stopper on a PVC pipe. My design worked flawlessly and I ended up winning, in no small part because I took the machine home and built some parts myself over two weekends. The key to making any machine work well is to drive it well, and that always takes practice. That was one of the big ideas our new coach brought to the team. So, we picked out three drivers after the Mall Day event a week before the competition and I basically pushed the three of us, myself included, of course, like professional athletes. We would be the best, that was just all there was to it.

It all worked perfectly. The machine, the drivers, all of it. NT BEST Game Day 2006 was one of the best days of my life. Everything just worked. I matched or beat my best scores in practice in all of our preliminary and semifinal matches. My little sister, Sara, and our other driver also performed magnificently. We were in first place by a considerable margin all throughout the day until the final round. The three of us all made the same, kind of mediocre score in the finals, so the end result was very close. With about 30 seconds left in the last match, my sister was driving and tied for first with another team. They really had an impressive, flashy machine. It had a really sophisticated, machine tooled mechanism for dropping lots of bandanas very precisely and quickly in one quadrant. That machine was very slow in moving around the field, though, and was not designed to get the bonus points like ours was. They adapted during the day and gave us a good run in the finals. With about five seconds left, though, Sara made one last score and added enough bonus points for the win.

That was, without exaggeration, one of the happiest moments of my life. We had won. I had won. My machine had won. I had used a design and strategy that no one, not even my own coach, had expected to even work. And I won. I showed them all. My “stopper on a stick”, as one of the other coaches mocked it later, had beaten them all. That particular coach built his team’s machine for them, which is a major sin in BEST, and I still beat them. I had also proven to myself in the most dramatic way possible that I could beat the odds through sheer force of will, power of intellect, and strength of character. No words, no number of exclamatory marks, no fancy formatting, can ever fully express how much this win meant to me.

That’s why I care enough about this contest to volunteer to help run Capitol BEST in Austin. I’ve carried hundreds of pounds of equipment and spent dozens of hours of my free time for the chance to work on the game field again, this time as a referee. It’s different, seeing the game from this side, but no less exciting. That will be the topic of my next post, coming soon.

Ft. Davis, the walking stick, and the odd midterm exam

As expected, the Ft. Davis trip was pretty much awesome. I posted some pictures on my Facebook for anyone who’s interested. For everyone who doesn’t know, Ft. Davis is a tiny town in west Texas. Dean’s Scholars goes because the McDonald Observatory is there.

The bus ride there wasn’t the best I’ve ever had, but it wasn’t the worst either. We watched movies or TV shows most of the way. One of the movies was about a west Texas town of 81 people that was filmed mostly in Ft. Davis. Dr. Cline, our administrator-type person and general leader, seemed to think this movie was somehow good or interesting, but it wasn’t.

The hotel was fairly nice. I got a room to myself, as we apparently reserved more than we needed. I didn’t argue with it. Its layout was a little weird; it was divided into at least four different buildings scattered around the downtown area. I think there were at least a few of us in every building.

We got up way too early both mornings. Saturday morning we went to the observatory for a tour. Seeing the telescopes and domes move was kind of impressive. Walking around the catwalk around one of them was fairly impressive, too, as that was the highest point for a considerable distance. The guy giving the tour was actually fairly interesting, too, much better than the standard public facility PR kind of person.

The fun part came after that when I and six others got off at the entrance to the state park on the way back, about four miles from town on the highway. We then hiked back to town, about six miles over the mountains. The first part was straight up the nearest peak and was much harder than the rest of the hike. The view was impressive; nothing like Colorado or Switzerland, but decent for Texas. The group and the path we chose were really a lot of fun. The senior that was generally leading the way said that more people had usually gone on earlier years, but I think seven was a good number. A bigger group would have taken forever to get through some of the rocks we climbed through and over on the way. Or we would have just chosen an easier path, which would have been less fun. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I seemed to be one of the more nimble hikers of the group; I guess I haven’t completely forgotten about all those afternoons spent wandering around in the creeks and such back home. Since I was fairly confident that I could catch up whenever I needed to, I generally hung back and kept whoever was falling behind company. Oh, I also picked up a really nice walking stick. I’m not sure what kind of plant it’s from; it’s not normal wood. It’s made of stuff that feels and looks a lot like bamboo except that it’s solid. It was growing out of a clump of some kind of big, flat, bright green, grass-looking-like plant. Whatever it was, it made a really good walking stick. It was still alive when I broke it off, so it was really strong.

We ended up going though an old cavalry fort at the edge of the state park on our way back into town. We then looked for a place to eat, as none of us had had a real lunch. It seemed like everything that looked like it had or might have recently been a restaurant was closed down and/or for sale. Even the one place we found that was open was for sale.

We went back to the observatory that evening for their “Star Party”. It wasn’t much more interesting than it sounds. The presentations were geared toward the 9-12 year old age group; we spent most of the rest of our time waiting in lines to spend 15 seconds or so at a time looking through one of their smaller telescopes at things like the moon, Jupiter and its moons, a “Ring Nebula”, or a cluster of stars. Not the most exciting stuff by any means. But, once again, the group I hung out with in the lines was fairly cool.

Sunday we got up at around 6 a.m. to go home. I was tired enough that I did manage to sleep for a couple of hours on the bus. It looked like most of the others did, too, as no one tried to put on any movies or anything until after our first stop.

And that was it. An interesting little excursion. After we got back that afternoon, we all went back to working on the homework we hadn’t been doing that weekend.

The rest of the week since then has been fairly routine. I went to Kealing for mentoring again on Monday, went to the physics homework discussion that evening, and went to another physics pizza lecture on Tuesday. I was slightly surprised to find lots of people and no pizza left when I got there; most of the earlier ones had had fairly thin audiences. I did have another chemistry midterm Tuesday evening, but that happens every now and then. We have our second midterm in calculus next week and Java a week after that. It’s starting to feel like we’ve finished a significant part of the semester.

I also worked out two likely options for what my schedule will look like next semester. No classes before 9 ever and none before 10 any day but Monday. I’ll also only have, at most, three hours of class on Friday. I think that worked out really nicely.

One last thing, my old BEST robotics team got 5^th at their competition last Saturday. Go them! I work at the Capitol BEST contest this Friday and Saturday. Should be long, tiring, and hopefully amusing.

And now it’s time to sleep. I really will try to get back to the insightfulness and such sometime, just not now. Good night.

Universal moral imperatives

I just finished packing for the Dean’s Scholars trip to Ft. Davis in west Texas to see the McDonald Observatory. We leave tomorrow afternoon and get back on Sunday. I’m taking a bus with 40-ish other Dean’s Scholars, mostly first years, since we got priority in signing up for the trip. It sounds like it should be really interesting. More on that when I get back.

Monday morning I went to Kealing Middle School, here in Austin, to meet my mentee for the first time. He is an extremely quiet and shy sixth grader there. You may remember that I signed up for this over a month ago and went to the training last Wednesday. It was an interesting experience. First, Kealing is huge for a middle school. I can understand a high school having several halls and more than one floor, but seeing that in a middle school was not expected. My mentee, himself, has apparently only spoken English for a few years (his first language is Spanish), which the mentor coordinator I talked to said might contribute to his shyness. I think he’s just shy and quiet, as what I could hear of his speaking was perfectly understandable. Obviously, my challenge will be to convince him to speak up and express himself more… I was thinking “more clearly”, or something like that, but convincing him to express himself at all will be an accomplishment. Definitely a fascinating little project.

Wednesday, in Research Methods, we had a new speaker, a criminal psychology specialist who has, in the last few years, become interested in what he calls “universal moral imperatives” and the ways societies justify breaking them. It was, naturally, a fascinating lecture for me. His initial explanation of what constituted a universal moral imperative was, I think, poorly worded, as he loosely defined it as “a moral principle that a society accepts by consensus to have no exceptions” and provided as an example the principle “that life is sacred and should be protected”. When he asked us who agreed with him that such things actually exist, only three people raised their hands. Actually, at the time, I was not one of them. I have previously hinted at the fact that all things have exceptions (did you read my post on “Conflict”? That was basically an entire discussion of exceptions to his example.), and I could not agree that such a plain principle could “have no exceptions”. I liked the idea, though, and really was interested in the rest of the lecture. This guy apparently got his start studying drug dealers and prison inmates. He acknowledged several times that he is “attracted to the margins” of society, and he also at one point commented that he doesn’t really know what that says about him but that he has to live with it, anyway. Interestingly, he was able to talk with great authority about his universal moral imperatives without seeming to give away any strong moral opinions of his own. Late in the lecture, after someone finally asked about some point of his contradicting the notion of the universal moral imperative (He provided us with many chances to question this; right from the beginning, even, his explanation of what constituted a universal moral imperative was flawed.), he explained that such moral imperatives should be seen more as ideals than as applicable principles. I wish he had started by explaining that, as the dichotomy between ideals and reality is a subject I have pondered at great length. I look forward to seeing where he goes with his next lecture.

We had our second physics midterm Wednesday evening. It kind of snuck up on us, as the professor didn’t mention it at all before Monday. It was no big deal, though. The test was much easier than the worst of the problems we did in class earlier this week (some of which were really impressive) and some of its questions looked very similar to recent homework problems. We’ll be having the rest of our “second midterm”s over the next two weeks.

North Texas BEST Game Day is this Saturday. It sounds like I was about right; the team has practiced a lot this week and they sound like they are scoring well enough to have very good odds at getting into the final round. Since this is a robotics contest, rather than wishing them luck, I’ll wish them skill and cleverness.

Nothing really profound is coming to me in the insight department right now, just a bunch of unresolved thoughts and fragments of thoughts. I’m going to have to start digging a little deeper to really keep this up, as I’ve gone over most of my biggest thoughts already. As always, though, I welcome any comments you might have on mentoring, universal moral imperatives, life in general, or anything else.

Home

So, obviously, the highlight of last week was leaving Friday morning to go home for the weekend. I’ll start, though, with some other events of note…

…like Monday’s physics lab. I’ve come to the conclusion that the only purpose of freshman physics labs is to reinforce the fear normal people feel for physics and to make physics majors hate themselves. It seems to consist entirely of pointless tasks like taking videos of a little metal disc moving around on an air-hockey table to determine the velocity and such. Oh, actually not entirely, because we also have to explain, in detail, how to “propagate the error” of every calculation we make. It gets even better, though, when the instructor requires that we make videos of “good” parabolas with our discs on air-tables. This is what we did on Monday; we made videos of “good” parabolas. This took me and my lab partner for the week three tries and over an hour of our three hour lab time. The entire time I was thinking things like “What the *&^% kind of physicist are you?!?! What the *&^% is a *good* parabola?!?! Is one somehow less (*&%^ *parabolic* than the other?!?!” I was clearly *really* enjoying wasting time worrying about this idea. The purpose of this lab was to use the motion of the disc on a tilted table to determine the value of acceleration due to gravity. Fair enough. So we needed the disc to accelerate down the slope. It should be that simple, but no, we needed “*good*” parabolas. I still don’t get why we wasted an hour on that.

Tuesday evening I spent an hour in a lab carefully analyzing a spring scale to write a page about it for my latest assignment in my Research Methods class. This is supposed to contribute to me experimental second inquiry in that class. This time, instead of just doing “something interesting”, we have to “do something interesting” that is *experimental* and *scientific*. Neither of these terms were clearly defined, a problem I harassed our lab section’s TA about at great length the week before this. We also discussed what constituted a “good” inquiry, the implication being that one inquiry is inherently better than another in an undefined way that, nevertheless, we should all be able to recognize. Man, I just love making unfounded, qualitative judgments in scientific settings! The poor TA never could quantify any of this. At first, she seemed to think I was joking, as she completely failed to even understand why I would object to this discussion. This Research Methods class is starting to take on an interesting (and annoying) dichotomy in that, in principle, it advocates and rewards creativity and “intellectual freedom”, the favorite term of one of our lead professors, while it still creates illogical or poorly defined rules and processes within which we must do our assignments and get our grades, just like any other mediocre class. If this professor had not repeatedly promised us “A”s for just playing along, I would be objecting rather loudly to more people than just the TA.

Wednesday, I went to “Mentor Training”, in which a post-college girl who seemed very easily flustered and unconfident read a “Mentor Handbook” to us for an hour. How this made us more capable and prepared for mentoring, I have no idea. Enough said.

Wow. I just realized what an unsatisfied rant I’ve been on for the last page. Good thing I have home to talk about; this post already needs more positivity.

I spent the rest of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday doing homework or preparing to go home. I left Friday at around 10:30, skipping a lecture by our angry medieval literature specialist in Research Methods and a lesson on “while” loops in Java. It turned out to be a good decision; I got home at around 4:30 and immediately got pulled in about three directions at once. First, I went to see the end of BEST Robotics practice. Sara (my little sister) and company have pulled it out and made an interesting little machine. It even sort of works. They’ll have to practice like fanatics to really compete at Game Day this weekend, but there’s definitely a good chance they’ll do reasonably well. I went with Mom and Sara to eat pizza at the local gas station/convenience store/restaurant (yeah, I wasn’t kidding: I come from one of those towns) and discuss recent news and politics and life and such. It was nice. We had to take Sara back to the school to get ready for the football game with the band. About the second thing the director told me was “So, you’ll play with us in the stands, right?” Then I visited the Ramsey family, the ones I worked for as the volunteer tutor last year. They are a middle-aged couple that has taken up providing a foster home for teenage girls. Naturally, they think I’m awesome, so that was nice. They want to have Mom, Sara, and me over for Thanksgiving when I come back again in a month. The girls I worked with last year are even still passing (!!), which is just incredible. They’ve got four new ones, though, and already worry that one will run away. That’s just how the foster-care business goes.

As corny and small-town as this will sound, the game really was fun. I was greeted by much cheering and joyousness on the part of the band as I pulled up in front of the band hall (being the hero of a small town high school is so cool). I then did, indeed, play with them in the stands. Of course, this was the homecoming game (it was an honestly coincidental circumstance that I ended up coming home the weekend of that particular game, but it was nice), so we had to wait for over half an hour as all the great and glorious accomplishments of the homecoming court were recited for us. This gave me some time to catch up with some friends and receive a few random text messages from one of them about a meeting in Sherman that apparently had nothing to do with me. I spent the second quarter, halftime, and the third quarter dong more catching up and hanging out and such. Good times, seriously. I hadn’t talked to some of those people in a year or more. It was kind of mellowing to hear about all the stay-at-home, community college greatness being achieved by the Tom Bean classes of ’06 and ’07, but most of them really are doing the best they can. I realized for the first time that weekend that I ended up being the farthest from home of my class: 5 hours. Kind of puts things in perspective. What perspective, I’ll leave to you.

Saturday morning, I went with Mom to watch Sara march at a competition in Plano. The band, even smaller than that of last year, was surprisingly impressive. The lead players were doing a good job of never making mistakes or breathing, as I know from the last time I heard them over the summer that it’s really easy to tell. Seriously, those lead guys, and especially their solos, were awesome.

After that, we went back to the BEST “Mall Day” in Sherman. Mall Day itself was excellent. Odd as it may be, I really enjoy watching all those high schoolers and their clumsy, handmade machines. I imagine that knowing how proud I was of my clumsy, handmade machines helps. Tom Bean really does have a chance to do fairly well. They need to make new wheels, preferably that don’t have slots cut in their rims, and they need to trim up a few bits and practice obsessively, but they have a chance. Yeah, they cut holes in their wheels so that they could reduce their weight, and in order to do that, they cut through the driving surface of the wheels. That makes the wheels extremely weak, as as much as half of the weight of the machine may rest on one thin spoke of the wheel. Luckily, these wimpy wheels broke at Mall Day instead of Game Day, so I imagine they’ve made new ones by now.

That evening I learned how good my Halo friends are at planning gatherings without me. “Halo friends”, to clarify, are friends with whom I went to or hosted LAN parties, usually centered around playing Halo 2 on networked Xboxes. Either I or one of the others, who is now in the Army, always did all the work and organizing to plan these gatherings. There was, very clearly, a reason for this. Despite telling at least three of them the exact day and time I would be home and available to play, three had to work, one was leaving to go to an aunt’s house (which, to be clear, I would have no problem with if he had mentioned this even as late as the night before when I saw him at the game, but he didn’t), and several were unavailable for various other reasons or unreachable. I still ended up playing Halo 3 for about an hour and a half with two of them and the random guy that lives with one of them. Good times. And I suppose it’s good to feel needed.

And that was it. Sunday I came back to school and went right back to the homework and emails and all the usual business. Life goes on, both in Tom Bean and Austin. So here I am.