Two Things

Thing One:

Violent video games are constantly blamed for the devolution of today's youth. Grand Theft Auto is often under the most fire, but other games such as Hitman or Halo are also just as violent. People claim that video games such as these cause youth to have a predisposition towards violence. In fact, I am currently working on a research paper concerning these claims. Here's what I've discovered. Even mild and innocent video games can cause ruffian behavior. How mild? How innocent? Take a look at this recently vandalized building:



Recognize something about it? Here, allow me to shed some more light:





That's right! The most innocent, block falling, Nintendo classic of old Tetris has polluted the youths of todays' minds with vandalistic tendencies (we'll ignore all the grammatical and apostrophe-ical flaws in that I utilized in order to make that sentence sound doctoral). So relax critics, violent video games aren't the problem. Violent teens are, they just vent their anger in whatever form they're familiar with. Grand Theft Auto = Beating down people and killing. Tetris = breaking out windows. So, the biggest question of all. . . what does Wii Bowling equal?

Thing Two:



This is the calendar for Sprague High School. The blacked out days are the completed days. The blue and green days are the days yet to complete. Seniors graduate Friday the 8th. That means we are almost done! ALMOST! Soon I will install a countdown to graduation on my blog and we can all countdown together! Graduation time in the past has always made me happy, and I wasn't even the one graduating. I just think it's exciting that all the seniors get to move on with their lives and do things that are actually noteworthy and different. Now it's my class's turn, we just need to make it to June 8th. Come on seniors, we can do it!

WiiBot

Favorite robot of the day! Come on, tell me I won't do this at MIT, just tell me.

College Writing Gay Marriage Class Discussion

The Gay Marriage Article has been moved to the new 8th Period College Writing Website at

http://collegewriting.googlepages.com

Enjoy!

Calculus

I was in Calculus. I had a red whiteboard marker. Result!

Long post about a bunch of stuff

Haven't posted lately, sorry. I'll try to cram everything into this entry. Ready? Here we go!

First up, a couple more t-shirts that I found entertaining (keep in mind these aren't pictures of the actual shirts, just what's on them. Just plain black shirts with the following equations in white):


Don't get it? Just evaluate the integral!


'nuff said.

Next up, speech team stuff. I'm doing an expository speech in speech team again this year (an 8 minute speech to inform, with visual aides). Last year was sock monkeys, this year is binary. I approached the topic with gung-ho enthusiasm, but everybody else (and I mean everybody) was skeptical. They didn't think it would do well, too boring and technical. WRONG! (said like the guy in the "End of the World" flash video) I have taken Binary to two tournaments. The first tournament I took it to was quite large (30 expository speeches, many quite good). I made it to finals and then BOOM! I won! Sock monkeys had never won last year, despite the cult following they achieved, yet Binary, the speech nobody was supposed to like, got first place at its premier. Things are looking up! Yesterday was another tournament. I took Binary to it and guess what! 3 rounds and 3 first places later, it won again!



That's my trophy. w00t! Oh, and at the first tournament I did impromptu speaking as well. Yep, won that too. Two first place medals and a trophy, not a bad start to the season!


Next story, Calculus CLASS!!!!!!!!

Of couse I wasted more time in calculus, it's what I do! Play-Doh again this time, but this time my friend and I actually made sculptures instead of monolithic works of art. Enjoy!

Amazing, huh? Ah calculus, what a wonderful class.

That's all for now, I'll blog more often, I promise. Until then though, bye bye!

THE GEEKIEST SHIRT EVER

I have officially found the geekiest, most amazing shirt ever. Other shirts that I own are quite geeky, be it my "Geek Squad" shirt, my "Silverware Family" shirt, "Pi" shirt, "Quantum Theory" shirt, "Power Button" shirt, "Rubik's Cube" shirt, "Clarinet Reed" shirt, or "I'm Legal" shirt. The shirt in this picture though, is far far far geekier than any shirt I own, therefore I must have it. If you can find a place to buy it, please let me know!

Snakes on a plane. Note the set notation that places snakes on a two-dimensional plane. Yes, that's right, geeky. But amazing, no?

SNOW!

So, here's my story. Let's start yesterday, Tuesday.

I was dreading the day. It was to begin with Early Bird Clarinet Sectionals (Lots of tuning) and then proceed directly into a Calculus test over integration techniques. After school I was to go home and then return at 7 in the evening for a symphony rehearsal. Overall, Blech!

I left the house at 6:20 and headed very slowly into school because there was sleet and freezing rain. That should have been my first hint to check the internet for school closures. I didn't. Instead, after having driven at 20 mph for 20 minutes, I heard an anouncement on the radio that school was on a two hour delay. I had this strange mix of emotions at that point. It was a mix between "YES! AWESOME!" and "CRAP! Now I have to drive twenty minutes back home at 20 mph, only to have to drive back into town in 2 hours!" So, I drove home.

When I got home I could have studied for my Calc test (because I really needed to), but instead decided to surf the net and talk to other delayed individuals. Soon enough, another anouncement came online: School Canceled. Score!

Now I can study and organize and get all set for school the next day, right? WRONG! I started by spending another 2 hours on the internet. I then proceeded to watch TV and then watched The DaVinci Code and after that fell asleep. I slept from 1-5 and then surfed the internet some more. More TV, and then I went to bed at 9, having accomplished nothing all day.

Why did I go to bed at 9? Because this morning I was awake at 2:30 to take my mom to catch the hut to the airport. I got home at 3:45ish. Great! Now I can study for my calc test that was likely delayed until today. WRONG! I surfed the internet. Then, school update. . . . 2 hour delay! Now I can finally study for the calc test! WRONG! Blogging. lol, so here I am at 5:55, putting off studying for this stupid test as long as possible. I've already been up for 3 and a half hours and just CAN NOT STUDY! I'm going to go order Pay-Per-View now, I'll see you around.

Oh, and another thing. They never stop at just a 2 hour delay. The delay announcement comes during the 5:00 AM time window, but they end up closing the school after 7:00. So now, I wait for the inevitable. . . another day of sleeping and TV. No motivation at all! Life is good.

Tuning Guide

In band we were told to make tuning guides to learn the pitch tendencies of our instruments. I made one, but being the geek I am, I digitized it. I transformed the tuning guide into a convenient, easy to use spreadsheet!

Here's what you do:

1) Open the following file with Microsoft Excel File
2) On the lower left you should see 3 tabs entitled "Tuning Guide", "Input", and "Hard Copy".
3) Click "Hard Copy". On it you will see a column of notes. If you play something other than clarinet then the range will be wrong, so just change the notes so they fit your instrument.
4) Print "Hard Copy" and fill it out.
5) When completed, open "Input". Again, the notes going down the column may have the wrong range so just change them. Make sure you stay in the green though, anything past the green won't show up in the graph! (There's a graph!? Yes, it's just that awesome of a spreadsheet!"
6) After you enter all your tendencies click "Tuning Guide" to see the graph of your tendencies and a table showing those tendencies.
7) Print the chart and prepare for Mr. Howard praise and admiration!

iPhone

So, Apple anounced its latest gadget the other day. Meet, the iPhone:



Just a heads up, I'm going to be buying one. $600, 8 gigs, June. Here's the wikipedia list of features. . .

Screen size: 3.5 in (8.9 cm)
Resolution: 320×480 pixels
Size: 115 × 61 × 11.6 mm
Weight: 4.8 oz (135 g)
Operating System: Mac OS X variant
Safari web browser
A widget engine
USB connection port
Plays AAC, MP3, Audible, & Apple Lossless audio file formats
Plays H.264 video & MPEG-4 video file formats
Voice Activated Dialing, web-browsing and typing
"Smudge Proof" Lens Coating
"Icon Clicking" GUI interface
Integrated WiFi (802.11b/802.11g), EDGE and Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR and A2DP
2 Megapixel camera
Widescreen iPod music, video and photo functionality
IPod portion features
Cover Flow interface and 3-D effects
Multi-touch screen interface (the "Home" button is the iPhone's only physical front panel button)
On-screen QWERTY keyboard
Fingertip scrolling, pan, and zoom (zoom out with pinch motion and zoom in by putting two fingers down and pulling them apart) functions
Built-in rechargeable, non-removable battery with up to 5 hours of talk/video/browsing or up to 16 hours of audio playback.


Also, to find out truly why the iPhone is amazing, watch Steve Jobs's keynote. It's an hour and a half, but you will be enthralled, just watch it.

Keynote

Symphony. . . at warp speed!

Funny things happen during symphony rehearsals at my school. When our director is working with just winds he tends to make jokes and lead into tangents that are oftentimes quite amusing. I decided to film this, and it was worth it. I sped the video up to twice the normal rate and "Voila!" perfection. Enjoy!

(at approximately 7:40 Mr. Howard makes a really weird noise with his lips. It's my favorite part)