The Finite

There was probably not a faster blogging mathlete in the state this time yesterday. I posted the last post “Schooling” from an ice cream van blazing down I-57 at an startlingly, um, “legal” velocity. We initially ran into some problems with the router and squid. But thanks to a Dell, an Acer and two HP laptops, we now have tunes, Youtube, and Counterstrike.

We were heading towards Danville, near the Indiana border. We tried to get a hotel nearer U of I but the Science Olympiad state competition crowded us out of town. Damn those Science Olympians! At least our digs are nice. It’s got an indoor pool and is gas station adjacent.

Now it just so happens that the day of Regionals is Junyong’s birthday. So we had a little surprise planned for him. To be ordered in advance and picked up at a local super market.

That wasn’t the only present JY got that night. One even inspired envy from the usually nihilistic Walthers, who requests a mint-flavored variant for his birthday.

After that, we took the traditional dip in the pool. We were supposed to play our favorite pool games: Leonhard Euler (our version of Marco Polo), Corpse Rope and Archimedes’ Principle among others. But Walthers wasn’t willing so we instead allied with the juniors in creating a maelstrom by running laps in the water. We then played Pirates of the Caribbean.

JY brought his Wii. Also, Zombies!, Apples to Apples and other board games. For most of the rest of the night, I was training myself to live up to my “Asian heritage”, as Matt Yang put it, by practicing Super Smash Bros. on JY’s Wii. We were innocuously hitting each other with hammers and loud drumming. The juniors were a few rooms down playing Call of Duty on a PS3, violently shooting each other with USPs and M203s. Oh the difference a year makes.

We decided to go to bed hours earlier than anybody else for two reasons.

1. We’re old.

2. Since this is our last year at state, we thought we should be at the top of our game for the competition.

So we went to bed at an insanely early. Mere minutes later, at midnight, we got a call and a question. Then another and another. The freshman girls kept calling our room and asking to talk with JY and Walthers and Schmitz (but not me for some reason). Schmitz refused to talk to them, as expected, so they talked to Walthers instead. They asked him things like whose the hottest guy on math team, boxers or “skintight briefs”, or what toothpaste he prefers to use.

Girls are weird.

Bright and early, we got up for the competition. I was shocked to discover that our window had completely fogged up during the night, prompting me to exclaim, “Wow! You guys are …moist!”

*Boring stuff: eating breakfast, driving to U of I while watching South Park, taking calculator test…*

We stuck around for a presentation about the TV show NUMB3RS, which apparently none of us watched except Schmitz. The presentation was pretty much “If you look carefully in this clip, you’ll see a really nerdy [book/shirt/model] that we gave the producers.” After Jay and Mike woke up, we left, skipping out on the awards.

I learned how to play Apples to Apples on the bus ride home. It’s a game where given a adjective, you must play one of the seven noun cards you were dealt. The person whose turn it is picks the most accurate or most ironic or, hell, the one they like best. The person’s nouns which are picked most often wins. It’s not as simple as it sounds. Though it is funnier than it sounds. Tactics must be adapted when playing with four teenage boys. “Postal Workers” wins “Sexy”. “Worms” wins “Furious”. “My Mind” wins “Dirty”. And “Girl Scouts”? I’ll spare your innocent minds.

The yearly ICTM Regional Math Competition is upon us again; at the large and very labyrinthine College of Dupage (COD) as usual.

Andy had no surprises for us. We all know about his laptop and DC/AC power inverter and wireless access point and internet capability in IL-53′s left lane. I got to pick the tunes this time. I usually don’t since my trusty but scruffy HP nc6000 has had battery sensor troubles; my battery voltage graph is a titration curve; it goes from “full” to 0% in a matter of minutes and the projected remaining charge times range from 3 minutes to 41 hours. The OS is just as misinformed as I am, so setting the thing to shut down when battery level is dangerously low is ineffectual. The old girl is getting on in years. I might be replacing her after graduation. Until then, I can just use the bus power from the ciggie lighter. My music is largely a scant couple of gigabytes of Top 40 from the last nine years. It received no complaints from bus riders, save that one song from Cannibal! The Musical.

Every math meet, I lament the loss (or “graduation”) of last year’s seniors, known to Cassidy as “the freaks”. Greta, Sam, Keith, Dan, Kushal. They took me to Champagne with them last year in the Junior-Senior 8-person team. Same goes for Scholastic Bowl. Damn those freaks for leaving.

This day was a damn big deal for all of us. Today’s tests decide if we’re going to Champagne or not. So I was at an emergency math team practice yesterday for two hours. I learned summation notation and standard deviation.

We arrived and had ten minutes to run to the individual tests. I had to drop off all my stuff and only then did I realize that I had worn my Scholastic Bowl shirt. Whoops.

There’s individual, oralist, 2-person freshman/sophomore, 2-person junior/senior, 8-person freshman/sophomore, 8-person junior/senior, calculator team. That’s about it.

I started the individual competition with high hopes. The first page was straightforward except for the last one. I knew how to do ‘em, that is. I wasn’t able to do the last half though. I didn’t see a standard deviation or a sum. but I did see a “root mean square”. All I remember about it is when I looked at it in the Precalculus book and thinking it was hard and not learning it. Apparently it’s just, wait for it, the square root of the average of the squares. And there was a bunch of other stuff I messed up just purely for lack of logic. I ended up getting only four or so right with the cutoff at eleven. D’oi. Similarly with the 8-person. We were two problems short of qualification; one if Walthers’ appeal went through.

The years before, I did only individual and 8-person. But today, they put me on calculator team. It’s basically like the 8-person, except with all grade levels represented and the problems almost never have whole numbers. I answered 2 of the twenty, I think. I can see why this test is so hard. It is so easy to mess up parentheses. We got eleven problems right. We qualified for state because the minimum is ten. Meredith also qualified individually. So it’s only the six of us this year.

PS The second half of this post was composed in a Southern accent due to me watching Forrest Gump while writing it.