If there is anything I should be studying right now, it should be 3D geometry and matrices for Math II, and Newtonian mechanics and modern physics for Physics. Both tests will obviously show how well I mastered the material compared with other students. However, I'll leave it to myself to figure out how much I truly like the subject area.
As my English teacher said, there are no pieces of writing that are purely narrative, as there are elements of reflection as well. For now, I'll be quickly doing a little reflection and evaluation of events that have happened so far this year.
I remember the only reason why I switched from Honors Physics to AP Physics B this year was because I felt the material in honors would be presented too slowly, and I would not be challenged enough in preparation for the subject test. I know very well that History and English are not my forte, so I see no reason why I should bother taking the test. Today, however, I'll see what colleges will think is my overall appreciation of math and physics.
I remember back in March, I had an orchestra project in which I arranged the "Olympic Fanfare and Theme" by John Williams to be played in a string trio. Apparently that inspired the athletic director to invite some orchestra students to play at the banquet. Yeah, because in every true athlete, some kind of Olympic dream exists, even if such a dream exists very briefly. I obviously will "never" become good enough at skiing to ever join any kind of team, nor will it be important for the rest of my life, since it appears that things such as science and research would most likely be what I do best. Regardless, for those athletes at our school who still believe, I say dream on, especially if you even paid attention to any of the groups playing on the stage. However, I guess music might possibly and very minutely still be important in my life...since the trio I played in obviously was worth mentioning to an athletic director
As a result, ever since March, several groups of musicians volunteered/were summoned to perform at the banquet. At one point, it was completely forgotten that the Olympic Fanfare was supposed to be performed at the banquet. It's amusing how it's the one that inspired the whole thing anyway.
Regardless, orchestra + sports-minded people = lack of attention to both groups. So although some pieces were played in a small corner, and other pieces were announced, and others just began at random, the applause varied directly proportional to the number of people that knew that some people were actually playing music...not that anyone could hear anything.
Really, one must remember that the sports banquet is to honor the student-athletes in the school. Oops, unless there are athletes in the performing group, hence it's a celebration of themselves. And besides, who needs to listen to some violins and other stringed instruments making a large amount of noise? One can listen to the sweet music of the food being prepared, the pleasant chords made by general gossip, and exquisitely voiced orchestral hits of students cheering.
In conclusion: let's see what happens next year if I go back as a musician in a rock band instead of a violist playing in a string trio.
I have to do this physics project in which I create a house that has some circuits with light bulbs spread out between two floors, switches to control how they turn on, and an alternative energy source to power one of the circuits. Of course, we also get to use a conventional battery to supply most of the house's electrical devices. So since Ellango was busy, Teresa and I worked for the time being. I'll ashume that I'll be responsible for the circuitry/wiring, Teresa will be responsible for the decorating/building, and Ellango will be responsible for making the battery.
Here's a very basic diagram of the circuit:
So basically this is the first time I stayed over at one of my friend's house until around 00:30 at night working on a project. At least Teresa and I got some of the annoying parts of the house finished, meaning the floor. The house is basically going to be like a cube, since we basically just glued some balsa wood together for the walls and the floors. Once the house is complete, wiring and preliminary decoration, we'll secure the house to a wooden board.
I was watching this A-team episode as a way to study for my physics quiz tomorrow:
This is an excerpt where Face and B.A. are basically coaching football, which is a rather amusing start to the episode.
Just so that this post is related to physics, I'll go ahead and blabber on about it, talking about this excerpt in terms of physics.
1. So a football player tackles someone else. Force is equal to change in momentum over time. So we'll use 70 kg as the mass of football player number 1 and 70 kg as the mass of football player number 2. Number 1 is running towards number 2 as shown in the diagram:
So let's say that player 1 is running at 4.5 m/s, which is about 10 mph. He collides into number 2. Newton's second law states that Force = mass x acceleration and Newton's third law states that every force has an equal and opposite reaction. And by altering the equation F = ma, we get F = m(v/t), and then we get F = p/t. We'll assume that if the football player didn't wear any padding, he would come to a stop in 2.0 ms. That means a momentum of 70 kg x 4.5 m/s = 315 kg x m/s to 0 kg x m/s in 0.02 s. That would be a force of 15750 N, or 3540 lbf. And this is totally why football players need a whole lot of padding, and why it's a physically demanding sport. (Yeah, I know I simplified the example, typically you'd have x and y components, and thus it would be a collision in two dimensions problem, and football players tend to fall down, so the change in momentum would be less.)
2. The whistle that Face was blowing...so sound travels at a speed of Mach 1. Yeah, like that says anything. The speed of a wave traveling through air would be velocity = wavelength x frequency. Thus by the Doppler effect, some football players will hear a higher pitched sound, some will hear a lower pitched sound, and others will hear the sound that Face is hearing. That's because they are running away from Face, running towards Face, and staying in place, respectively.
3. We can see the grass as green, because light from the sun is reflected to our eyes by the blades of grass. It is in the visible spectrum of electromagnetic waves. It's wavelength is around 520–570 nm, and thus the frequency is around 5.504 x 10^14 Hz. And thus the energy of a photon of green light (slightly off topic by I don't care), would be given by E = hf, so E = (6.63 x 10^-34 J s)(5.504 x 10^14 Hz), and 3.64 x 10-19 J.
4. All those gold chains B.A. is wearing is pretty heavy. But it also will get pretty hot in the sun, and they will expand a bit because of thermal expansion. That is given by the equation (change in length) = (coefficient of linear expansion) x (initial length) x (change in temperature). The coefficient of linear expansion of gold is 14 x 10^-6 (C°)^-1. We'll just say that initially B.A. had about 4 meters of gold, at 20°C. And since he's in the sun, let's say the gold is now at 25°C. That's a change of 5 C°. So uh L = (14 x 10^-6 (C°)^-1) x (4 m) x (5 C°) = 0.28 mm. So the gold doesn't expand too much.
5. Just for the heck of it, the A-team always gets into gun fights with bad guys. Back in the day, people measured the speed of bullets using ballistic pendulums. Basically this is would be a conservation of momentum problem - total momentum before = total momentum after. Since the pendulum rises, we will also need conservation of energy - KE + PE before collision = KE + PE at pendulum's maximum height. then pugging in known quantities will give us 1/2(m + M)v^2 + 0 = 0 + (m + M)gh.
6. Also just for the heck of it, Murdock is the pilot for the team, even if B.A. ain't getin in no plane. So Bernoulli's equation gives us: P + 1/2pv^2 + pgy = constant. And in a special case of Bernoulli's equation when afluid flows horizontally with no change in height, we get P sub 1 + 1/2 p sub 1 v sub 1 squared = P sub 2 + 1/2 p sub 1 v sub 1 squared, saying that when the speed is high when the pressure is low. Because airfoils are designed to make air flow faster on the top of the airfoil than on the bottom, we get a net upwards force, and thus get dynamic lift. This is probably too complicated for the AP test anyway, and I don't understand all of this anyway.
Alright, so I talked about Newtonian mechanics, sound, heat and fluids. That's too much studying for one night.
This post was written on May 8 and published on May 12.
Two down, two to go - in terms of the AP Quizes I have this year. Why quiz? My journalism teacher last year said "Good luck on your AP World History Quiz." So I might as well call it a quiz again this year.
The multiple choice section was not too bad, and approximately what I thought it would be. As for the DBQ, I actually guessed correctly that it would be about Colonial America. All I can say is that I am grateful that I had some lectures in AP Lang about the Scarlet Letter, which I could use to talk about Puritans during the time.
I can't believe that 2 of the free response questions on the BC test were exactly the same as the ones on the AB test. That's just pretty bored. And also lazy of the test makers. Let me qualify that argument...if the test makers gave different questions for us, the AB people would probably have a slightly easier problem compared to ours. Or maybe not. I don't know.
May 1 is one of those bored days where students around the country scramble into a building to take the "SAT Test." (SAT Practice) "Some will win, some will lose." (Cain) There was basically a swarm of students around El Cerrito High School, where I was stationed to take the SAT Test. On the admission ticket, it does say "arrive no later than 7:45," so that's why everyone was there early. Then the door opened at 7:45, and everyone pushed their way in through the doors. I recognized a cluster of Hercules High School Students and someone yelled out my name. I said, "yeah, hi" as my response. While walking in the crowd, it was as if we students were going into this baseball stadium, were excited for a game...say, the Giants versus the A's in AT & T park. All of that rush, minus the cheering and the screaming and the chanting.
My proctor was pretty darn American. For my current life, the term American refers to anyone who is slightly slow, makes mistakes, stumbles over words, uses excessive speech fillers, and all kinds of other things...but in this case, reading the instructions wrong three times in a row:
-Good morning. Today you will be taking the SAT Subject test to show what you know
-Um, we're taking the SAT Reasoning today.
-Yeah, reasoning.
-Oh sorry, you will have to forgive me for this. Today's a Saturday and I'm not thinking right. You guys said reasoning?
-Yeah, reasoning.
-Okay. I don't know, I can't find this in the instruction book.
"It goes on and on and on and on." (Cain). Three times over. All I know is that this was just too funny seeing her fumbling with the test instructions, asking if we had "number 2 pens," and telling the people who were lost what building in which they should be taking their test.
This arrangement of Don't Stop Believin' is getting a bit out of hand. I forced myself to go to bed last night around 00:30 when I simply was too tired to continue working. By working, I meant doing some calculus multiple choice questions and working on my arrangement. The thing is that the piece is not that hard to arrange. However, some things like voicing and harmony are too complicated to do in 20 minutes - the amount of time I had for working on the piece before I went to school. In general, the only problem I have now is an underdeveloped viola part and transcribing the guitar solo about three minutes in the piece.
Either way, I'm glad one draft is done. And with the rehearsal today, hopefully we (we as in my ego and superego) can make adjustments to the arrangment accordingly based on the stuff I heard. There are some people in the class who are very passionate in hating this piece and really not wanting to do it. And basically here's this: I am basically arranging the piece I want to do. They can't tell me what I want to arrange, and should they be very passionate about what song they want to do, they should arrange it themsevles. So today, I'm goign to give the warning, "for all of you who don't like this piece, please keep share you comments now. I dont' want to hear any criticism except about my arrangment except for how it could be improved based on our rehearsal."
I simply don't need any more belittlement in orchestra.
So every year, sometime in April, I have been required to take these standardized tests that show my overall competence in subjects like English, math and history. Yeah, I've done this for a little too long and it's getting a bit annoying. However, starting in high school, these tests started becoming amusing, and I started laughing at how some questions are so badly written, or how easy some questions are. Of course, having taken Summative High School math twice, I can safely say it's rather stupid in that there are some things, like probability questions, are never really gone over by our teachers. But, the literature that is chosen for the English examination is repetitively interesting. And heck, it's not a timed test...so I could spend a very long time reading all of the good poetry and excerpts from essays and novels, and then consider working on the questions. So projected scores, math will be highest, followed by science, and English and then history. Exact numbers, I don't know, nor do I care. All I know is that I'll miss being able to skip class to take this test.
It is currently 02:10 as I am writing this post. I had basically fallen asleep approximately four hours ago, after I finished watching "The Best of James" Thomas and Friends video. It's kinda sad watching classic shows as such, especially if they are on VHS instead of DVD. All I know is that I can hardly imagine what it would have been like creating one of those episodes using train set models. And I'm totally spoiled with all of these digital video manipulation tools for today.
In general, I have been spending time working on producing a 5 minute clip on art forms during the great depression. Compiling music videos/spoken words and other stuff shouldn't be too hard, but sometimes it just requires too much patience. I am frankly too tired to want to spend very much time on splicing clips and narration together.
One thing that I have totally been very bad with lately is remembering to write a post everyday. And likewise, I'm still working on organizing and producing those videos I recorded from Lake Tahoe during spring break. Not to mention, I also have some blog posts in a document on the netbook that I have yet to finish writing.
Anyway, this AP Lang video will all be over in four hours, should I need that much time.
I am basically spending some time arranging "Don't Stop Believin'" by Steve Perry, Neal Schon and Jonathan Cain, performed by Journey. Okay, most Americans know this piece already. Basically, I am quickly scribbling out an arrangement of this piece for string orchestra (along with electric guitar, bass, and hopefully, drums) so that my orchestra can have something to sightread. I've already played around with this song back in COSMOS, where my cluster performed this piece for the talent show. And I'm the bored person pretending to look cool, by being the conductor. In general, I more or less know the song very well by now, since we've had so many rehearsals there already. This is my justification for arranging the piece.
So I've busted out Sibelius to start writing in some parts. And when the program loaded, it told me to check for updates. So I looked at that, and my web browser pulled up saying "update to Sibelius 5.4." And then I saw "or Sibelius 5.2.5 for windows" on the website. It's hard to imagine I've had this program for so long now.
I am seriously behind in writing these blog posts. But frankly, it doesn't matter since I haven't done anything important, interesting, worthwhile, exciting, necessary or exillerating for the past couple days since I went to Lake Tahoe. Basically, a good deal of juniors are going to be taking a practice AP Lang test in the library, which means missing periods 1, 2, 3 and 4/lunch. And just to make sure we take it seriously, our instructor decided (out of the kindness of his heart) to count the three essays and multiple choice section as part of our grade. That's all for now....
Today I got back in school since Spring Break ended. And I am currently writing this on 2010-04-13 02:00, meaning I'm definitely staying awake doing stuff. I frankly don't remember what I even accomplished today, because I'm still extremely scatterbrained and sleep deprived from the night before.
I am theoretically working on my AP Lang project right now, since it is extremely important we have everything be completely done for peer edits on Tuesday. What I'm in charge of for now is to finish my part of the essay and finalize a bibliography. Also, I'm supposed to work on my note cards for any additional sources I may have found besides the ones I already found.
Okay, other stuff I'm supposed to do...Spanish, where I'm supposed to look up some more information on Barcelona, Spain. I will be writing 10 sentences about the place, in particular relating to a picture of the city. This shouldn't be all that bad.
Also, I need to study for physics, if I can even find the time in this night to do so. So yeah...I need to remember stuff regarding radioactive decays, and the amount of energy released, and some equations telling me how to compute the kinetic energy of those particles moving around, etc. And no I don't really know what I'm talking about (yet).
So all in all, I basically have got a good deal of stuff left over for my first night right after Spring Break. Also, I simply was too lazy to write daily entries for my time at Lake Tahoe. I have one of the days drafted on a document on the netbook while I was on my way down from the mountain, but the other days I just got lazy or something. And for this very moment, I don't know whether that ski trip was beneficial to my sanity or not. I got very lucky to have another chance to go up the mountain, but now that it's all over, I'm in a slight depression. All I can say, upon reflecting on the past few days, is "what happened here?"
This is post is also written late, but I don't care. Basically, I managed to get out of the house to go skiing/snowboarding one final time. I had been looking forward to it for a while at home. But in general, it simply wasn't as exciting as it was in February. But I can say that I got to sit right seat on the car ride up, and I was able to get approximately 40 minutes of continuous scenery (yeah, with some small cuts between). Yeah...days to upload this large amount of data...and yet Embassy Suites still call it "high speed Internet." These videos and others I recorded that day needed the past few days uploading to YouTube... while I was busy on the mountain. And I must say that Embassy Suites is relatively enticing with it's floor plan and interior design. Seeing a central atrium and a view all the way up to the roof really reminds me of the design of cruise ships. Either way, I"m going to quit writing now and reflect on yesterday, since I am writing this post on Friday, April 9, for Wednesday, April 7.
Although this blog post is supposed to be for Tuesday (2010-04-06), yet is written two days late (2010-04-08), I feel that it's better to write about this day rather than skipping this day. I managed to get my AP Lang project members together to do some "complicated" group work. The most important thing we got down were some recordings of the poetry we selected. All other stuff will have to be searched for at some website or archive. Or if I get bored, I could perform some music selections, as long as it pertains to "art in the 1930s." Or something like that.
I also had to leave for another trip to Lake Tahoe (2010-04-07). Why...well I kinda had two left over passes from when I went in February. That's approximately $140 wasted if I don't go. And besides, I think to most people who know me well enough, skiing is more important than a lot of normal everyday activities. So is snowboarding...since I took two lessons at Boulder Lodge in February, and I feel it is another one thing to add to my tiny list of athletic capabilities I have. This hopefully explains why "mundane" desires are reducing my productivity in this project (and in school in general).
I remember in COSMOS I basically managed to write some posts the following day. Meaning, if the post was for Wednesday, I wrote it on Thursday. Basically nothing happened today, except more goofing off on FSX and reading some papers on some Great Depression musicians. I believe I had this next Cessna Citation 500 that I installed that day. Anyway, it's been two days since I wrote for this post, which is kinda embarrassing.
One of the projects I have over the break is this AP Lang research paper on art during the Great Depression. So today, one of my partners came over to find some more poetry that we could possibly use in the essay, and possibly read out loud in the video. I have the list of some poems we found in this other blog post.
So one of the songs that I am now practicing for piano is "Charleston" by Mátyás Seiber. I played it - or rather I attempted to play it - and noticed it had this sort of jazz-style syncopation. At the bottom, I noticed that it said "Copyright 1933 by Schott Music International, Mainz." I thought that this music might work for the Lang project since it's in the 1930s. Plus, the music had a rather rushed and anxious tone. But then I remembered my piano teacher told me he was a Hungarian composer. I think I would be better off using American music.
Later in the day, I was working on some AP Calculus stuff. This time I was reviewing polar graphs, how to find the length of the curve, and the area of the curve, and the like. All I know is that I seriously need to memorize the half-angle and double-angle formulas for sin^2 x and sin 2x, etc. And, I'll need to review some techniques of integration, such as splitting it up, using trigonometric substitution, and other fun stuff.
Not only did I review math, but also I reviewed English. I worked on some sample ACT English problems. The style is a bit different compared to what I'm used to with the writing section in the SAT. And obviously, for anyone who bothers to read this blog, my writing style is far from perfect. I know I'd get about a 3 for each blog post had it been an essay prompt to reflect on my day. Why? Stylistic errors, poor structure, inconsistent tenses, less than feasible transitions, distracting digressions, grammatical errors and all kinds of other components of writing. Regardless, I still managed to get 32 out of the 45 sample questions correct. I was too lazy to time myself, since this is my first time, and because it's just a rough idea of the areas I need to practice. And heck no, of course I don't have patience to review the exact reason why I got each problem wrong.
So to end the day, I was looking around on flightsim.com to search for some scenery and some aircraft. I found this Cessna Citation 500 I used to love flying on back when I still had my Dell Inspiron laptop, and before the hard drive failure (which one of these days I need to find some data recovery service to retrieve my files). So seizing the opportunity, I quickly downloaded that and installed it. I also downloaded this Qantas A330-300, this Queen Mary cruise ship (yeah, it's configured as an "aircraft"), and some scenery for Albany, New York. Flight sim communities are really the reason why FSX is not going to get boring for me any time soon.
So uh...all that's left is to actually enjoy playing around with the stuff I downloaded.
I can safely say that I haven't bothered to think about any of the work I'm supposed to do during the break. This is evidenced by the 3+ hours I've spent on flight simulation today. Of course, this is not entirely true since I've done some academic stuff.
According to College Board, music is theoretically an academic study, as evidenced by its AP Music Theory test. Therefore my piano lesson today is an academic endeavor. Basically I was working on the B-flat minor scale for today. There are of course other pieces I was working on, but I'm too lazy to write them out.
After my piano lesson, I reviewed some kinematics for physics. Here's where the lame blog post title comes into play. In basic projectile motion, every physics student in the right mind will remember to break up the force of a person throwing a ball into its horizontal and vertical components to solve annoying maximum height and time to hit the ground problems. Likewise, I reviewed that Work = (Force)(distance)(cos θ). After studying the calculus way about how this works (the dot product of force and displacement (vectors) resulting in a scalar), it really makes sense how I got this formula in the first place. This is probably why Physics B and high school physics in general must be so hard for teachers to teach.
As for the other part of my title, vectoring an aircraft is interesting. Especially when the Air Traffic Control in Microsoft Flight Simulator X gives me so many instructions to turn in xyz direction before I can even respond. Yeah, obviously a bug I've only experienced a few times:
Southwest 420, turn right heading zero niner five. [1 second]
Southwest 420, turn right heading one zero zero. [1 second]
Southwest 420, turn left heading zero eight zero. [1 second]
Southwest 420, turn right heading zero niner zero. Airport is at your 1 o'clock, one five miles. Report runway in sight. [1 second]
Southwest 420, turn left heading zero eight five. [1 second]
Southwest 420, turn right heading zero niner five. [1 second]
Fortunately there was no such thing today when I was flying a Vietnam Airlines Airbus A321 to Ho Chi Minh. In another flight, I was flying a Ryanair Boeing 737-800 from Liverpool to Dublin. Interesting thing is that their cheapest fair available for this flight is £6.00, without additional fees. Adding one checked bag would cost £15.00, which is more than your own fare. No wonder Southwest is boasting that bags fly free.
And these two flights only took up about two hours. I used the other hour reading about how ILS works in the Learning Center tab in FSX. All I know is that there are some vectors I should follow for an ILS landing, according to the Jeppesen chart for xyz airport. And no, I have not been able to successfully do a full instrument landing after flying around for so long now. All I've really done are visual landings with a little help looking at the moving map on the Garmin GPS. So er...I guess that if I wanted to get bored, I could do this:
Say I have this runway 9 (which I got off of Flightsim.com obviously). I'll pretend it's 3000 meters long. So if I wanted to express this runway as a vector. I'll say it is <3000, 0, 0> or perhaps 3000i + 0j. That's obviously something you'd never do if you were actually seriously doing physics, calculus or aeronautical navigation.
It's finally spring break! Or well, on the district calendar, only the school days (April 5-9) are marked as spring break. It doesn't' really matter, and I would just like to say I hope I can accomplish what I want to do this week off. That means: clean up my desk, work on AP Lang research project, go snowboarding and actually go down a run without falling down, organize my pictures and videos and work on various musical pieces. I'll get into specifics later, after I write down what happened today. But I must say that those who read or care to read this blog...everything state is true, but I do not wish to write out every detail of my life because life is short.
Today I gave Ellango a music cd as his 42 Day present in Orchestra class. Basically the Beatles' "Yesterday" is one of his favorite songs. I basically looped the song over again over for the entire disk. It kinda is a waste of a CD, but it's a mundane token of well, uh, I guess we can call it friendship.
While in Orchestra, Mrs. Calonico was being nice and decided to make banana bread for us after a job well done at the concert the day before. And thus I received an "assignment" for helping out with arranging music from "Up."
As more evidence that the day before spring break is more or less a joke, I played this element creating game thingy where 4 players had marbles represent protons, neutrons and electrons. The object of the game is to score as many points as possible by creating a stable nucleus, a neutral atom, or a stable and neutral atom, based on instruction cards drawn. It definitely teaches a lot about physics and helps to review for the AP Physics Test.
I'll skip further into the day. I basically stayed after school to work with my calculus teacher on a music project. I was playing around on a drum set, and I just have to say it was another one of those brain-stimulating activities when I'm trying to learn something new. The feeling was much like my first time hopping on a snowboard and trying to learn what to do.
And in conclusion, I have been wasting time downloading some aircraft for Microsoft Flight Simulator X, while doing physics.
I am just tired right now. I am sitting on my desk, with work out, and two browsers open for different e-mail accounts. I also forgot that I had an orchestra concert after "waking up" just now.
The concert was not the best our school has ever had, and I'm sure other people agree with me. Of course, it's always nice being able to see elementary school students come and try to play what they have learned after those few months of training. And really...just having any kind of music program in elementary school really does help in giving slow people the opportunity to have a "head start."
Overall, I gave most groups an excellent as their CMEA rating. I have the paper with my comments somewhere in that red folder I brought to the concert. Basically excellent means between 80-89 out of 100. I did take points off for rudeness. A lot of kids don't have the patience to sit through a concert with their mouth shut...or at least closed while another group is playing a piece. And that included musicians from my group as well, High School Intermediate Orchestra.
But at least we had a little fun with ourselves. We managed to play very badly on purpose for the first few measures of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3. And then we had a half-spirited decree: "April Fools!" And then we played it for real. Either way, it was interesting, but the audience didn't really deem it all that funny since we didn't say "April Fools" together.
Aside from the concert, I also had this little assignment for journalism for who I would interview if I could. I was thinking, I'll choose Mr. T. After all, I've watched "The A-Team" for quite a while now. I would really like to hear him say "I pity the fool!" in person though. My friends (who are not in journalism) also gave interesting answers, including people Bill Gates.
Lastly, I'd like to quickly mention Spanish class, since we are now learning about the conditional tense. English: I would like to buy a hamburger. Español: Me gustaría comprar una hamburguesa. So yeah. I would like to go to bed, but I would have to finish my work first.
I'll have a title for each post in this series starting tomorrow, 42 day.
