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Category Archives: life
First week in China
[pictures coming soon]
I’m spending winter break in China to visit my relatives, who I’ve never met. The last time my parents saw them was 16 years ago! Last Saturday (12/17), we took a 13-hour flight from San Francisco to Shanghai, China.
I thought the initial experience of being in another country was interesting–everything is written in a language I can’t read or write. In addition, Shanghai had their own dialect which is unlike anything I’ve heard before. It’s a shock when you can’t understand anything around you.
As a friend drove us from the Pudong International Airport to a Holiday Inn near the train station, I noticed how advanced and industrialized everything was. The highways were all perfectly lit with strings of yellow street lamps. Huge billboards hang over the road at regular intervals. On local roads, most of the traffic lights have timers counting down next to them. It’s very different from our streets, most of which are at least two or three decades old.
Trick-or-treat!
For Halloween this year, I dressed up as part of Nick and Alex’s rock band. I had a red inflatable guitar and a wig which looked really silly on me. (It made me look almost like a girl!) Alex had this freaky looking witch wig with spiky long hair, and a neat inflatable keyboard. Nick decided his hair was long enough as it was (laugh) so he just took a guitar. It’s too bad I didn’t get a picture of the three of us together.
The school Halloween parade took place at lunch. We were going to go for “Best Group,” but decided not to participate at the last minute because we thought everyone would laugh at us. Now that I think about it we probably should have joined anyway. The best costume I saw there was probably Danny P’s–he was a street lamp that actually lit up! LOL
Earlier this night, I went trick-or-treating with five other people. Ryan was a human skeleton; Sydney, Lisa, Lauren were explorers wearing black garbage-bag robes, feather hats, and plastic swords; and Karen (Sydney’s friend) was a Chinese guy. Zack didn’t come with us; he decided to go trick-or-treating in his friend Matt’s neighborhood instead.
Thanks to daylight savings, which ended yesterday, it was completely dark outside by the time we left at six-thirty. According to Google Earth, our complete route was around 3.4 miles! That doesn’t even include the distance walking to and from each house. Over three hours, we had each collected about nine pounds of candy!
When we got back, my ankles and feet throbbed painfully whenever I took a step. I rushed inside and dumped the whole pillowcase-full of candy on the floor to count and sort them. Just for fun, here’s a pie chart showing the different types of candy I got.
It’ll take me all year to eat all that candy. Come to think of it, I still have ten or twenty pieces of candy from last year stashed in my closet! Happy Halloween, everyone!
BAMA 1
This year’s first Bay Area Mathematical Adventures (BAMA) was with Dan Goldston on twin primes. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand the majority of his presentation. He used Mathematica to create scrolling, animated representations of prime numbers. This was pretty cool, although he didn’t get into much of the actual formulas. Not that I would be able to understand it, anyhow. This level of math is above me. I did like his mini-talk on “45 minutes of fame” though–he showed us an article in several newspapers, including the San Jose Mercury News. He was even mentioned on Slashdot back in March 2003, for a “breakthrough in prime number theory.”
Named a semi-finalist in the Discovery Channel Young Scientist Challenge!
The list of semi-finalists for the Discovery Channel Young Scientist Challenge (DCYSC) has been published! Check it out, I was named one of the semi-finalists! They mailed me a certificate as well as a nice DCYSC water bottle.
The DCYSC is a nation-wide science competition for students in grades 5-8. They seek out and recognize young scientists who show extraordinary talent in the “exploration, understanding, and communication of science.”
In just a few more weeks, (September 14), the top 40 finalists will be announced. They’ll receive an all-expense-paid trip to Washington D.C. for the final competition! I’m holding my breath for now. If I get selected as one of these forty, I’ll have the chance to compete for the top prize–a $20,000 scholarship as well as the recognition of being “America’s Top Young Scientist.” See Discovery’s press release for more information.
The countdown to choosing America’s top young scientist continues next month, on September 14, when the field of 400 semifinalists is narrowed by the DCYSC judges to the “Final Forty.†These 40 finalists will travel to Washington, D.C. October 15-19, where they will take part in the DCYSC finalist competition at the Cole Field House at the University of Maryland. The finalists will compete in team-based, interactive challenges designed around the theme of “Forces of Nature.†The young scientists will have to use their scientific know-how to find solutions to some of Mother Nature’s most extreme challenges. The students will compete for more than $100,000 worth of scholarships and special prizes, as well as the title of “America’s Top Young Scientist of the Year.â€