Gearing up for Gorillas

Arghhh! Overload of math homework.. Destruction in T- 10 seconds. 10..9…8…7… mission aborted. Whoa! That was a close call there. All the hard work I spent on my math howemowrk could have disappeared. Avoid disaster on my notebook.. check! So as we were given textbook homework, chapter 7 quiz, final exam review, and algebra II review, of course I finish the textbook homework and the algebra II review except for the domain and range problems. If you noticed, I believe I completed the assignments least necessary for next week’s math class. Probably should have started my final exam review.. lol.

Well, anyway last math class was mainly about Hamiltonian cycles and traveling salesmen. The Hamiltonian cycle was created in the planar graph of a dodecahedron, and the cycle used all the nodes in the dodecahedron created the cycle.We did some fun Hamiltonian Cycle Puzzles which were quite entertaining, albeit hard for me to solve… So one of the puzzles formed G4G which I have no clue what it stands for. But when I looked it up, I received results like  the ones below. Seriously Gearing up for Gorillas? People now a days. Then we looked at traveling salesmen problems. They are basically us calculating the shortest paths for some salesmen to  reach peoples’ home and make a pitch about “Your lawn looks a bit yellow. I guarantee that if you use my product, it will turn green. (Side-effects include purple grass and an unusual increase of snake population) It is only $10000000! So get it now!” But they are really fun especially if you play the game about Makoto where you hear his cute little feet scuttle across the paths that we make him walk over! So that was this week!

Wow, everybody is procrastinating in doing their reflections! It is already Friday, and so far, nobody has done their reflection yet. Too busy laboring on the math homework, I guess. Speaking of which, there is so much homework this week! Textbook work, Pizza hut Problems, Chapter 7 Exam, Final Discrete Math Exam Review, Algebra II Review (even though it is not due next week), not to mention the 2 blog posts. It is enough to drive anyone bonkers. PLUS, I have two major piano competitions on Sunday that are super competitive and hard, a three day long Spanish final exam next week, a Super Hero (Element) project for science also due next week, and a bunch of homework from teachers who want to take advantage of the three day weekend and just do not get the fact the school is pretty much over, at least in my mind…. (*deep breath*) It took 142 words just to briefly explain why I am mildly irritated right now….

On to (slightly) lighter topics: last week, we learned about Hamiltonian Cycles and the Traveling Salesman problem and played some games related to the topic….Oh no, Makoto, do not fail! No! He failed!….with some interesting exclamations in between. The music was quite addicting, too. Overall, it was a fun class, and it saddens me to think that there will be only two more classes left. I will miss you guys, at least the ones that are not going to Altholton High School next year. Even you, Cecilia, although I guess I will still occasionally see you at piano competitions. And, (there must be something wrong with my brain) I will miss your crazy and spontaneous singing and your rantings about how clouds deserve worship, although I must agree to disagree with you on that topic. I know you will all miss me, too, because I am just awesome like that. Above all, I will miss you, Mrs. Krummel, because you have been my fabulous math teacher for two and a half years and you taught me a lot and made the math class fun for me, despite my unruly classmates. As for you, Irene and Sam, I will not miss you quite yet, because 1) you annoy me frequently and surreptitiously, especially you, Irene, and 2) we still have to go through four years of high school together (I have no clue how I am going to survive that). So there, that was my lamentations about the end of this amazing, once-a-week math class and do not expect me to repeat it again until, maybe, the last blog post. And guess what, I will even miss the blog posts, annoying as they were are. It was hilarious to read your blog posts and I loved having a chance to vent my anger at the extraordinary mountain of homework that we get. Maybe I will check on this blog next year to see how the new Discrete Math students are doing and whether they are as awesome as we were. It also pains me deeply to think that, once again, I will have to attend math class every day next year. But, despite all of that, I think I am ready for high school, if only because of the fact that I have fulfilled the promise I made to Cecilia in the beginning of the year and have written a blog post that is not just 500 words long, but an astounding and totally unbelievable 651 words long. And, as I have strayed off topic and have lost my train of thought, my blog post for week 31 now draws to a close. So much for the slightly lighter topic. I really am becoming more and more like Cecilia. Not that it is a bad thing (usually).

Well, at any rate, see you guys next week for the Discrete Math final exam!

Hello, everyone. After surviving an absolutely hellish day, I’m ready to go to sleep after this post. And after editing that English paper. And after… zzzzzzzzz.

But you get the point. I’m tired, so I’m making it short and snappy.

Irene, you described me as abstract. I suppose I’ll take it.

That statue of the horrible poet was so awesome and misplaced, I have to include it as my picture. I think my new goal in life is to have a statue like that, though without the metal bird and the live bird on his head. But honestly, if you’re going to make an awesome statue of someone, make it someone who can write a half-decent love poem.

Meanwhile, I have done many of my questions for Pizza Hut, but I have decided to wait until I have finished all of them to put them online. I really didn’t face many challenges, but I can tell the next two weeks will be different in that regard. We have 4 different assignments: the review, the take-home test, the Pizza Hut Problems, and the textbook work. I’m not sure if I can get all of it done, but I know I will. (That doesn’t make much sense, does it.)

At the Centennial Visitation, I saw Phillip but not Erik and Cecilia. I didn’t say hi because he was talking with his friends. I also saw someone smoking outside, which I’m pretty sure is very,very against the rules. I didn’t turn him in, of course. I don’t want to be known as that type of kid before high school even starts.

Tomorrow is field day at Veterans Elementary, where my little sister and brother go. They tried to introduce one for 6th graders last year, but they decided to stop because it was so much of a flop.

The 8th graders have a lot of things coming up, but I haven’t had enough time to think about them to become excited.

I will close out my post with one of those “beautiful” Goethe poems. Hem hem.

How fair doth Nature

Appear again!
How bright the sunbeams!

How smiles the plain!

The flow’rs are bursting

From ev’ry bough,
And thousand voices

Each bush yields now.

And joy and gladness

Fill ev’ry breast!
Oh earth!–oh sunlight!

Oh rapture blest!

Oh love! oh loved one!

As golden bright,
As clouds of morning

On yonder height!

Thou blessest gladly

The smiling field,–
The world in fragrant

Vapour conceal’d.

Oh maiden, maiden,

How love I thee!
Thine eye, how gleams it!

How lov’st thou me!

The blithe lark loveth

Sweet song and air,
The morning flow’ret

Heav’n's incense fair,

As I now love thee

With fond desire,
For thou dost give me

Youth, joy, and fire,

For new-born dances

And minstrelsy.
Be ever happy,

As thou lov’st me!

Amazing. Kill me now.

See you next week,

Colin

P.C. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Goethe_Monument_Chicago,_by_Hermann_Hahn.jpg

Pizza, by:ZeroOne, flikr.com, http://www.flickr.com/photos/villes/2863944324/, (CC) BY SA,

Hey guys! Today was so awesome. Before I start explaining why it was so awesome I should say that I have been very busy lately. On Tuesday was the orientation for high school. Supposedly Xiaolu saw Sam, but of course I was oblivious and did not see him. Wednesday was our school’s enrichment fair. Xiaolu and I drew this awesome board which had a Shakesperian guy going “Thou art in for a memorable night.” It was epic. But took a while… especially the S in HMS.. we were going for perfection. Lol. Then today was our service learning project. We were cleaning up the Patapsco River. So, there are 9 groups and we collect trash and garlic mustard. Then at the end the trash from each group is collected and weighed. Our group won! Yay! We collected 260 some pounds of trash… one piece we collected weighed 62 pounds; we are awesome! And tomorrow I am going to NASA on this girl field trip and Saturday I am going to Kings Dominion for orchestra. On Monday, my social studies and spanish project are due. So, I am having a pretty crazy/awesome week!

What did we learn in math? I forgot… oh yeah! We learned that Erik has awesome crazy talent at making confusing problems about his epic graph. And that Sam likes mazes, Colin is very abstract, Cecilia still loves clouds, Xiaolu likes monkey king, and Phillip makes asymmetrical bear/squirrel/penguin graphs. So we presented our graphs and got a very fantastic surprise… wait for it… we were assigned to create problems about pizza and Pizza Hut!

On the last day of math class we will be going to Pizza Hut and eating pizza while solving the problems we created. The problems will cover all the topics we learned throughout the year and it will be epical. Forgive me for using the word “epic” so much, but it is an awesome word. This is probably the best assignment I have received ever.. this year! The probability of that statement being true is 94% true. The other 9% is made up of the assignment from me to be awesome. Yes I know those percentages do not add up… its cuz of my awesomeness!

Okay so that was last week. This week we are learning about traveling salesmen. Whoop! I don’t know what it is but I hope to be enlightened… Sorry for my late post! Byeee!

Yesterday was the most freakin’ amazing day ever. I went to New York for the first time, which I’m not ashamed to admit, and saw my first Broadway show.

I am now regretting that it was my first, and not closer to the 20th.

Nick Jonas sang and acted and talked really quickly, Anderson Cooper narrated, and the guy who played Bud Frump was absolutely HILARIOUS.

Still, it was an overly long ride there and an overly long ride back for less than 2 hours of New York time. Worth it, though.

I can’t make connections or say my problems for anything this week in math, so instead, I will go off on a long tangent that’s equal parts math, programming, music, and me spewing ideas at the world in hope that someone can understand them, because I sure don’t.

Check out the keyboard above – just a single octave’s worth of keys, 13 in all. If we want to try to get the computer to understand these, we can’t just say that the note on c = c, because there are multiple “c”s. Instead, what we could do is give that note a value, like in this list:

low C = 1

C# = 2

D = 3

D# = 4

E = 5

F = 6

F# = 7

G = 8

G# = 9

A = 10

A# = 11

B = 12

high C = 13

Then, we could assign each quantity to a .wav or .mp3 file that plays just that note.

Ex.

if note = 1

play(lowC.wav)

From here on, it gets a bit more musical.

A major third is four half-steps, and a minor third is three. A major triad chord involves a base note, then the note a major third up, then the note a minor third up. A minor triad chord involves a base note, then the note a minor third up, then the note a major third up.

So, imagine the major_third and minor_third functions as outputting the note a major/minor third up from the given note.

In the program, it would look something like

def major_third(note):

return note + 4

def minor_third(note)

return note + 3

Then, the major triad of n would be the array [n, major_third(n), minor_third(major_third(n)))]

And the minor triad:

[n, minor_third(n), major_third(minor_third(n)))]

To simplify things if we want to have an interval that isn’t a third, we could make a universal makeinterval section that takes both the note and the interval, although the interval would be in terms of my special note notation, not the normal interval notation:

def makeinterval(note, interval)

return note + interval

Every single chord could be created from this base notation of [n; makeinterval(n, interval_1); makeinterval(makeinterval(n, interval_1), interval,2); ...]

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how we program chords into the computer,

Sam

Website for this Image: http://logosinstitute.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/51c…

Ignore that picture except for the main title.

Alright, I’m officially thoroughly confused. This whole time I was thinking that I was posting the reflections really late and I’ve been feeling bad about it. However, I’m on the same week as everyone else. That doesn’t make sense. I’m thinking that I skipped a week somewhere in between. I’m going to check that after I finish this reflection.

Anyways, this week, we had a research paper due. Needless to say, I did it the night before it was due. In my defense, we had two days to do it. It’s not like I can start it one day and continue it the next. That’s not the way it works. When I get on a train of thought, I need to stick to it so that the paper flows even averagely well. Otherwise, I might start rambling about different things randomly. That would be bad. I’m also quite irritated. SHE DOESN’T ACCEPT REPORT COVERS. WHO DOESN’T ACCEPT REPORT COVERS?!?!?! THEY ARE SO GOSHDARN PROFESSIONAL. It is a REPORT cover. I’m pretty sure that that implies that it should be covering a report. What in the world, right? I thought it made my report look all the more fancy shmancy. Who doesn’t like fancy shmancy things? I don’t know either, guys.. Whatever. I’ll survive. Hopefully I get a good grade on it, though. I might’ve screwed it up though because I didn’t have six legitimately distinct sources. I had four. However, I put several facts with each source. In my opinion, that should be good enough. With my luck, though, it probably won’t be. It’ll be okay though.

This week in math, we were assigned the Pizza Hut Problems. It just might be the coolest math assignment I’ve ever gotten. I’ve now truly realized how this class has changed me. Before, I would’ve probably found the assignment geeky. Now, it’s freaking fantastic. Like what’s better than going to Pizza Hut in math class? NOTHING!!! Ahh that should be fun.

The final scares me. What if I totally fail? Ahh that would be horrible. What would happen if I did fail? Hmm… I mean I wouldn’t have to repeat the course because it’s not available again until eleventh grade. Retaking it would be annoying, though. After all, I know most of it. I’d much rather be taking Calculus B/C in 11th grade. I feel like precalc and calc will involve much less thinking than Discrete Math did. Discrete reminded me a lot more of competition math than regular math. I guess that might be because it is “a branch of contemporary mathematics that develops reasoning and problem-solving abilities, with an emphasis on proof.” See, this is why it’s hard for me. Proofs are not exactly my cup of tea, if you will. They’re just really hard for me. I don’t really know why. Maybe because the person who first introduced me to proofs was a gym teacher. We never focused on hard ones either. Therefore, I never got any real “training” in using my brain and all of the information in it to figure things out. Is that called critical thinking? I think so. Well, I’m bad at that. I’m good at problem solving in life, just not on paper. I guess this is one of the few cases where I have more “street smarts” than “book smarts.” I hope that review that we’re doing will help. Otherwise, I’m not really sure how the chances look for me.

Well, I guess that’s all for now

C’y'all later, people,

Phillip

P.S. I just checked the reflections and I can’t find Reflection Week 20 or Reflection Week 21. That’s kinda depressing. I can’t imagine how the cycle got messed so long ago. Speaking of cycle, there are these magnet things on the side of Mr. Senisi’s room and one of them said “frame of a bycyle.” I assume he meant bicycle. What in the world is a bycyle? And people say I don’t pay attention to my work. Tsk tsk tsk…

Hi! I am not sure if we are supposed to do a blog post for this week, as we did not exactly learn any math from the textbook. However, since Cecilia already did hers, I will do mine, also, although it will once again be pitifully short.

So, what did we do last week? Well, we went over all of the awesome and clever graphs that we did. Mine was, sadly, the worst. Erik, yours was too 3-Dish for my simple brain to grasp. Sam, your maze graph was really cool. Phil, your weirdly shaped bear was also pretty cool. Colin, yours was, well, totally creative, or should I say turtley creative. Cecilia, I liked your cloud graph, although I still believe that you are too engrossed in clouds. Clouds DO NOT deserve worship whatsoever. Irene, your elephant with a rose was hilarious. And as for my graph, well, it was a stick monkey with a magic baton in his hand. What can I say? I hope at least you enjoyed my presentation even though it did not really teach you anything, nor did it challenge your brains. Ah well, maybe next time.

Next we went over the pizza hut problems, which are really awesome, by the way.They are a fun way to review all those stuffthat we have learned this year. Thanks, Mrs. Krummel!

What to write about….(*glances at word count*) Oh no! I only have 247 words and I am already out of ideas. Well, I hope this is enough. (262 words, now) See you guys tomorrow!

Fahrenheit, that amazing rollercoaster that I waited awkwardly in line for one and a half hours with our school's band teacher and health teacher

I am writing my reflection today, on Tuesday, not having started my Pizza Hut problems yet. This is probably not a good idea. However, I really felt like I need to get this reflection over with before I do anything else. (Hence, my writing this right now.)

This week, we did our namesake graph presentations. I was very much impressed with and intimidated by the graphs of Sam and Erik because they were so complex. I remember in fourth grade, with our awesome math teacher, we made stellated rhombic dodecahedrons (I think that was what they were called), but I lost mine, and I no longer have a cool looking spiky ball that can morph into a cube. Mine was messily taped anyway. Erik’s design seemed a lot less complicated after he explained it on the chalkboard, but I still don’t really get his questions. And Sam’s graph was just overwhelmingly colorful and complicated and messy and simple and organized at the same time. I couldn’t stand seeing another amazing graph, so I went next.

Listening to “Dancing Through Life” is not very good encouragement for me to keep on typing this reflection. Now I’m wondering why both Elphaba and Galinda like Fiyero if he’s so disrespectful of learning and school and the things that will get you somewhere in the real world. I mean, dancing is awesome, but Fiyero just seems like some jerk who doesn’t care about anything. The only good part about Fiyero is that he can justify everything stupid he does through song: “Dancing through life, swaying and sweeping, and always keeping cool! Life is fraughtless, when you’re thoughtless, those who don’t try, never look foolish! Dancing thorugh life, mindless and careless…” Nevertheless, it is a good song.

We have pizza hut problems, as I mentioned before. I should probably start working on them sometime. It sounds interesting, but I actually have to find out how to fold origami shoes by Thursday too.

This paragraph will be an explanation/apology for any possible lateness/leaving-early/absences in May. All of my performances in everything happen to be in May. So, this Thursday, we have our spring concert for chorus. Even though we’re going last, we have to be there at the beginning of the concert, of 7. Given that we (me and two other girls) are taking the initiative to buy flowers for our chorus teacher, however, we will probably need to get there a little earlier to discuss how/when we’re going to give them to her. This means that I will need to leave around 5:50. That probably won’t change anything because we tend to finish a little early anyway, but I’m just saying it now so nobody can accuse me of not warning you. Next Thursday, 5/17, is the enrichment fair. The enrichment fair starts at 6:30, but our teacher has not told us what time the Shakespeare performing people have to be there yet. I’ll let you know as soon as he tells us. The Thursday after that, 5/24, is show day for the DLC class production of Fiddler on the Roof. Call time is at 5, and the show starts at 6, so I can’t come to class that day. I think you said that 5/24 was when we were going to take the final. Is is okay if I come.. sometime else? Like on the next Wednesday, 5/30? I would totally come the day before, 5/23, but the whole week is tech week, and Wednesday is the dress rehearsal. The Thursday after that, 5/31, is the last Thursday in May. Finally. I happen to have my Scholastic national awards ceremony at Carnegie Hall on June 1st, and we are either leaving or planning on Thursday night. I think that that was our planned Pizza Hut day??? If it is, I need to try to persuade my parents that I can totally survive for 24 hours without sleep, because I really don’t want to miss Pizza Hut.

On top of all of that, our school has an 8th grade talent show on June 5th. This means that we’ll have rehearsal from 2:45 to 4 every Wednesday and Thursday starting from this Thursday all the way up to the show. Obviously, this meant that I had to push my voice lesson half an hour forward on Wednesday and arrive at swimming late, which consequently would mean that my swim coach would be really mad at me. On Thursday, this meant that I had to write on my permission slip that I had to leave early every Thursday. Even so, I might get to math class 5 or ten minutes late. And now you’ll know that I wasn’t beinglazy/finishinglastminutehomework/playinghookie. Now aren’t these talent show planning people just delightful? They have to schedule the rehearsals when nobody has time. Pretty much all of my friends have math or dance or swimming or soccer or  track after school on Wednesdays and Thursdays. After I got over my rage at the planning people, I looked on the bright side: I’ll be able to sing for an hour every day after school! Isn’t that lovely?

By the way, Mrs. Krummel, and everybody else in our class, you are totally welcome to come to our concert. Chamber choir only fails at two of its songs. For the three that we sang at Hershey Park, we are actually decent. We got full score at Hershey, which I totally thought we didn’t deserve because we messed up on the “froc de bur” verse, but the judges liked us so much that we also got first place and judge’s choice! The band and orchestra got those too. Wind Ensemble is performing before us in the concert, which is totally wrong because they’re better and should perform last, but, as I said before, people who plan such things are seriously disturbed and obviously don’t think that pink is the best color. <– Legally Blonde, anyone? No? Okay. Maybe I’m the only one who lives under a sparkly pink diamond.

Today was high school visitation. Centennial HS was so boring, and there were examples of all the extracurricular stuff except for singing. I was kind of mad. Anyway, even though I’m the weakest person ever, I think I might do cross country with all of my friends. This club called Horizon forced me to take one of their pink slips of paper. I still have no idea what they do.

People actually commented on my reflection last week. This was surprising because I thought nobody actually bothered to read my long rants about life that week. I am first again. This is even more surprising because I am a huge procrastinator.

My picture: “Fahrenheit,” melvdesigns, Flickr, (CC)-BY-NC-SA 2.0

See you on Thursday!

lovelovelove,

Cecilia , who will now go figure out how to fold origami shoes and hopes that she has at least 47, combined with Erik’s, to give Mrs. Doring on Thursday

And yes, I am testing to see if you guys actually read this part.

Photo credit: www.xkcd.com

Hey everyone,

This website has reduced to begging me to notify the site administrator about WordPress 3.3.2. I think I am finally it’s master.

About time this happened.

Anyways, binary trees really don’t seem to have much application in daily life. I mean, you have a node, it splits off into 2 nodes, the new ones either stop there or split into 2 new nodes, and you repeat for however long  you can without completely squishing the  lines together.

Whoopee.

But for those of us mathematicians who need some filler for a blog post and are still, after 28 weeks, committed to putting something vaguely applicable out there in the hopes that someone, somewhere, at some time will use it, failure to apply teachings (FAT) is unacceptable.

Side note: Does “FAT fighters of the world, unite” sound like a good battle cry?

Hence the comic above.

Out of all of the murky proofs that involve cutting down trees just to find the height of nodes, and the various ways of writing out a binary tree which, let’s face it, don’t make much sense, the only thing that managed  to hold my interest for more than the usual 4 seconds this week was family trees.

Bear with me here.

A regular family tree, starting with the oldest and going down to the current generation, is only binary if every couple has exactly two children, and there is this one mystical superancestor who reproduced asexually (you can tell I’ve been studying for the Science MSAs) to create the left and right subtrees of the family.

Because, remember, the tree always starts at one?

If you turn the tree upside down, though (the EPA has NOTHING on graph theorists), starting with one member of the current generation at the top and splitting into each ancestor, as long as nobody adopted or reproduced asexually like the increasingly less plausible superancestor, you get a binary tree.

However, this raises some interesting issues.

In my reverse ancestral binary tree, there are 1,063,741,824 nodes in the 30th level.

The issue?

Population estimates place the world population at 300 – 400 million in 1100, the time period for the 30th level if each generation is spaced, on average, 30 years apart.

Is 400 million less than 1 billion, or am I reading my numbers wrong?

Someone needs to tell the Powers that Be that They kind of messed up with this whole ancestry thing,

Sam

P.S. Just kidding, Powers that Be. We’re cool.

Sadistically peculated from: http://en.clipart-fr.com/Clipart/Trees/

We learned about binary trees last week in class.

They have leaves, which are connected to just one branch, and roots, which are connected to multiple branches.

Each root can be connected to a maximum of three branches: It is on the end of one, and it can create up to two more.

There is an original root node at the top of the tree, and the rest of the graph spreads downward from it.

Wow, I already have one hundred six words.

My new limit is 279.

Okay, binary trees look like this, because my description is terrible:

________|________

____|____                     ____|____

___|___     ___|___     ___|___     ___|___

The roots are the |’s and the leaves are the _’s on the bottom. The height is three, because it has three levels.

Each level added can double the amount of modes in the graph, and then add one.

Level one has one node.

Therefore, the number of nodes is less than or equal to 2^n-1.

My proof is very unmathematically sound, but proving obvious things always annoyed me.

A cool thing we did in class was a binary search tree, where each number is greater than all numbers to the left of it. Note that I intentionally left out the redundant …and less than all numbers to the right of it.

Using a search tree, you can find a number in log_2(n+1) steps, where n is the number of nodes in a tree.

I’m interested in what everybody’s graph looks like.

—Erik, who’s word limit is not suspicious at all.