Wouldn’t it be cool if cell phones communicated to each other and could relay calls from one to another? Perhaps cell towers could be eliminated–the mesh network formed by the phones could relay messages across the country. For privacy, you could use public-key encryption between the callers so that no one else would be able to listen to the call. Then again, it’s probably infeasible for a few reasons. 1) It would take up a lot of battery power for each phone to relay other people’s calls. 2) It would have to reach a critical mass before coverage would be good enough. 3) It would not work in rural areas where there aren’t other nodes around to relay a call.
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For the past month, I’ve been volunteering for Oak Grove High School in San Jose, helping their special education robotics team. They invited me and another student from Lynbrook Robotics to go with them to their national Botball competition in Honolulu, Hawaii. I’m going to be leaving tomorrow, and will return on July 14th.
I’m finally going to start blogging again. My entire first year in high school has passed, so I’ll write a brief summary of what’s happened:
Science fair: Since the last summer, I had been researching music analysis using computers. I did a science fair project on using computers to find songs that sound similar to each other based on timbre (musical texture). I won a grand prize at the local Synopsys Championship, and went on to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (Intel ISEF). There, I received 3 special awards totalling $1200. At the state science fair, I also got an honorable mention.
Lynbrook Robotics: I joined the Lynbrook Robotics Team this year. We participate in an annual competition called the FIRST Robotics Competition, in which we get 6 weeks to build a robot that plays a particular game. The game this year was to to hang inflatable pool tubes (”ringers”) on a 3-layer rack, in rows and columns. We competed at San Jose State for the Silicon Valley Regional, where we got 4th seed in qualification matches, and we got to the semifinalist rounds. We later competed at the Lone Star Regional at Houston, Texas. We did amazingly there–we were the 1st seed in qualifying matches, and we got to semifinalist rounds again!
Help describe me by adding to my Johari Window!
[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.