Linkstew

So today, this highly amusing post to Craigslist was shard on our office misc list.

And as fate would have it, I came home this evening to find my roommate and a friend of his had gone out today and bought Magic 7th Edition (They're on 7th edition!?) and were playing it on the floor. "We were sitting in our GSI office getting all nostalgic about Magic, and so we went by Games of Berkeley and picked up some cards..." he told me later.

I really don't have anything constructive to add to the discussion. Instead, I'm going to tell a vaguely relevant story about a poem I wrote.

So first you should read my poem. It's very short, and doesn't have enough words to actually get confusing.

So, the story:

Princess Diana died when I was a senior in high school. The next day at school, my AP English teacher decided that everyone in the class should write a poem to "help you come to terms with Diana's death" that night for homework (And I'm positive she's having a whole class of kids write a poem about todays events tonight). So feeling a little put off by the forced nature of assignment, I wrote my poem in five minutes during my class the next hour. I didn't even look at the poem that night. I turned it in on the same sheet of binder paper that I'd written it on the day before. I wanted to make it apparent to her that I didn't like the assignment and that I'd intentionally put no effort into it.

The day after I turned the poem in, I walked into class, and my teacher approached me immediately.

"Benjy, I want to talk to you about your poem. Could we go over to my desk?" she told me.

"Uhh... Sure?" I wanted her to know I'd done a half-assed job, but I didn't want to be confronted about it.

"Your poem was wonderful! I made copies for the whole class, and if you don't mind, I'd like to share it with the class this period!" she gushed.

"Uhh... Okay, I guess." I said, more than a little confused.

"Do you mind if I make copies of it for all the other English teachers?"

"Uhh... I guess not." I felt like a deer in headlights.

So I wandered in a daze back to my seat, and sat there for an hour as the class analyzed the dickens out of my poem. They spent more then twelve times as long analyzing the poem as I did writing it. And they came up with all kinds of meanings and details about the poem that I hadn't intended. And in that very surreal hour, I came to feel very sorry for those exquisite dead guys whose words high school students analyze year after year. "If they're reading this much that I didn't intend into a 30 word poem, how much crap is it possible to make up about a 300 page novel?"

And what was the single meaning of the poem? Well, I had been chatting with some friends on the net when the news of Diana's death slowly spread. Curious, I attempted to load a few news sites, but to no avail. The net was clogged up, and the whole thing was grinding to a halt as everyone tried to read about it. And the poem was drawing a parallel between the packets crashing in the internet and Diana's car crashing in the tunnel. And that's all.

And the reason I told this story is to hilight how clogged and slow the news sites have been today, as everyone tries to read about "Red Tuesday." CNN.com was text only for awhile, and even Yahoo! is running adless at the moment.

For starters, I had a 61b and a 61c project due last week, along with all the regular homework and labs. I've also been doing Lab Assistant stuff for 61a, and when you add in the hacks I've been working on for blackbox, the lack of updates should be understandable. But on top of that, I have a 61b midterm monday, a Math 54 midterm wednesday and a psych midterm friday, and 2 more projects due on wednesday, March 3rd.

This semester hasn't been hard so far, just tedious, and I don't imagine that it will be getting any better. I'll probably be so sick of programming by this summer that I won't even want to look at code all summer. Well, maybe not, but it's a possibility.

On another note, West High again won the Kern County Academic Decathlon. On February 6, 1999, Natalie Underwood, Gabrial Reyes, Kristen Tarjen, Jason Garthhoffner, Debi Lugo, Raymond Carr, Julia Stover, Mike Mikita and Melynie Thomas cleaned up, taking home a total of 54 medals, first place in superquiz, the top scorer in each division, and the top indivual scores in the county. They'll be competing at UOP in Stockton, CA over the second weekend of March for the chance to represent California at the National competition. I'm going to go hang out with Alan and Ed that weekend and see about visiting with the Acadec team.

I know why the sky is blue and how the grass grows; I know why I can hear the answers to my questions and how I can see the sun rise in the morning. The world is so well defined now that the whys and hows aren't very magical anymore. I don't have to wonder what is in the next valley or across the ocean. Roads go everywhere and satellites see everything so there is nothing left to discover.

But before these indisputable facts were agreed upon, everyone knew, just as surely as today, that the sky was blue because the ocean went on forever and that the grass grew because gnomes pushed the grass up through the soil every night. The wind carried all the answers to our ears, and we saw simply because we did. There didn't even have to be a why or how for things before reason and logic set in.

We have spent the last four years of our lives memorizing why and how the world works, and that knowledge will serve us well. We won't have to question the whys or hows as we go about our lives, because we once read the whys and hows in a book.

But no matter how certain we are of our facts, we must not close ourselves to new ideas which conflict with our beliefs. Just because a person is crazy enough to suggest that there is a force which holds us to the ground or that tiny microbes are responsible for disease does not mean we should laugh at him. The notion that we are held to the earth by invisible forces and that equally invisible creatures make us sick was ludicrous, but is accepted today as a fact of life.

So before holding too dearly to any established fact over the ludicrous suggestion of a madman, consider the grass you are standing on and the sky above your head. Then listen carefully to the words of the madman and look him in the eye. You will find there an idea which could revolutionize the world and change the way people think about themselves and everything around them.

Again.

1998-April-25 was West High's Junior/Senior Prom, and while a goodly number of other people seemed to have a good time, I certainly didn't. I do not know why, but I found myself unable to enjoy myself. I think it may have been because I was not expecting to have a good time from the start. That and the music injured me at a karmic level.

1998-March-19 was Bakersfield Colleges Annual Journalism Day for High School Journalism students from around Kern County. I didn't know about it, but after the fact it turned out that I won an honorable mention for Mail-in News Story for the article I wrote about this years Academic Decathlon team.

On 1998-March-7 I went to the 27th annual CSUB math field day. In the 25th math field day, I got an honorable mention in the team medley for frosh/soph. In the 26 math field day, I got an honorable mention in the team medley for the varsity and a 4th place for the individual medley.. I had just edged out my friend Alan, who took 5th. This year, I took 5th in the individual medley, but took first in the varsity team medley along with Don and Neil.

This appeared in the Bakersfield Californian in November of 1996. Some day I might dig up the actual date, but my hunch is that it was Tuesday, November 20th. Rereading this, there are a lot of things I would have said differently, but that's to be expected. Oh well.

As the nine members of West High's Academic Decathlon team walked off the stage for the final time, the jingling got louder.

"On dasher, on dancer..." a student in the audience joked as we returned to our seats.

This ringing was not that of eight tiny reindeer on the roof of Bakersfield College's indoor theater. Instead, it was the sound of the 47 medals hanging around necks of West's team members.

But those medals were hardly a gift. We worked hard. In fact every team that participated in the Academic Decathlon spent many hours preparing for the event.

Despite their dominance, large schools like overall winners West, Bakersfield and Highland, were not the only participants in the Academic Decathlon. Students from smaller schools such as McFarland, Kern Valley and Erwin Owen also won medals.

As the name suggests, Academic Decathlon is a national competition comprised of 10 academic events that include math, science, language and literature, social studies, fine arts, economics, essay, speech, interview and super quiz. Super quiz, which is the only publicly viewed event, allows everybody to see how hard you didn't study.

Each team of nine students is divided into three groups based on grade point average. Students in the honors division have a G.P.A. of 3.75 or more, the scholastic division students have G.P.A.s of 3.0 to 3.75, and the students who compete in the varsity division have a G.P.A. of 2.0 to 2.75.

The amount of time required to study everything you ever wanted to know and then some about 10 subjects is often underestimated. Some people who thought they would be able to handle the work found out the hard way; while others just adjusted and had fun studying.

From the time we got our first study materials in August until just before we took the first test, we studied every scrap of material we could get our hands on.

People have asked me just how much we really studied, and the answer is that we really studied at least 40 to 60 hours a week. We met every day after school for at least two hours. And we met every Sunday for most of the afternoon. And we studied our material every spare second that we had.

Despite the commitment and discipline Academic Decathlon requires, I enjoyed the process tremendously. I got to know the other eight members of my team better than I want to know most people.

From exchanging jokes at breakneck speeds to eating pizza on the couch while watching a baseball game, studying for the Academic Decathlon was fun.

But I learned more from the experience than what a LASER is and what the chief exports of Angola are.

I learned how to work together as a team with eight other people who would sometimes crack one too many jokes. I learned what it meant to really study. I learned that managing your time, energy and sanity are important. But most importantly, I learned that staying up utnil 4 a.m. trying to remember the difference between Burundi and Rwanda is really not a good idea.

Now West's team gets to start studying again. In March, we will compete at the state Academic Decathlon representing not just West High School, but all of Kern County. We get to spend even more Sunday afternoons together, and we get to learn more about Africa, and we get to eat more pizza.