June 13, 2022: Water Balloons

The classes we had were were Graph Theory, taught by Po, and Alternating Sums (according to the schedule), taught by JM. 

During Graph Theory, one of the questions we talked about was the max flow min cut problem because of the seminar yesterday.

The alternating sums class was actually on generating functions since we did alternating sums last time with JM.

During Lunch, EW and RW were racing making origami turtles, by which I mean EW had to make two while RW only made one, yet somehow EW still managed to win because he’s just that gOoD. (and the only reason I could remember it was today that this happened, bc I’m writing most of my posts a lot after the day actually happened, is because I went back in my YouTube watch history to figure out where I started watching turtle folding tutorials :p)

I tried to follow along, as did Turtle. Turtle was more skilled than I, but we were both okay.

Then we took MOP Test 2.

Then, during dinner, after we finished eating, we played Fish. The people who played with us were Evan Chen, JW, and some other people. Our Fish games went on a bit long, though, until we missed the test review and got kicked out of Resnik for staying too long.

Apparently, the test review was really interesting. Turtle was struggling on Red problem 1. He was essentially live solving it and having immense difficulty. In the discord, a bunch of people kept spamming “poor Holden”s and “poor Mr. Holden.”

(And yes, I use light mode discord. So what??? It was automatically light mode anyway! It changes based on my surroundings and/or the time. Like, if it’s nighttime it’s dark mode and if it’s daytime it’s light mode! Stop hating on my discord!)

I tried to ask JC what they were doing in test review to prompt the spamming, but he refused to answer and just kept trying to con persuade me into going to test review.

Once everyone (even those at test review) returned to Stever, I went and killed LuT in the mafia game at 8:40 pm (sorry about that, by the way, LuT). It was both really nerve-wracking and exciting: my heart was absolutely pounding out of my chest and all sorts of other cliche terms. I saw somebody walk into the elevator alone, followed him in, asked his name, and then tapped his shoulder and said “Bang!” once he got off on his floor.

But because I killed him, I needed an alibi. A lot of the girls had been planning to go get boba, so I started asking them when we were going to get boba and actually leave Stever and the crime site. But they were busy playing foosball and being like, in a moment, in another moment, etc. Then, JC popped up and said he had water balloons! He got them from CVS a few days ago, along with itch cream for his bug bites and a bunch of cashews.

Now, water balloons are obviously much better fun and much better as an alibi, so I leapt on the chance and went with him to fill up water balloons. It was so much fun! We started out pretty bad at doing the water balloons: the water balloon pack had come with a sort of screw-on thing to put the water through into the balloon, but it didn’t really fit on the faucet, so we were having difficulties actually filling the balloons with water, as the water was just spurting everywhere but into the balloon. Eventually, I figured out that I could just block the water from spewing all over with my hands and then turn the water pressure up to the highest. That way, even though it’s still only half (or less) of the water getting in the balloons, it’s still enough.

KS (and honestly, the rest of the people who were playing foosball and who’d been planning to go to boba with us) also helped fill water balloons. She filled them from the water fountain, just by wrapping the lip of the water balloon around the top of the faucet. 

JW also did water balloons with us. When we later went outside to throw the water balloons, she put her keycard and stuff inside so they wouldn’t get wet. However, she put them under my jacket, and later, she couldn’t find them, so she kind of freaked out for a while.

Then, we started throwing the water balloons at JC (he volunteered) and accidentally splashed DerL (who is obviously my triplet, as well as EL, because we all share the same last name :P. DerL is the youngest and I’m the oldest, but EL is a grade below the two of us because he was held back) as well. We’re really bad at aiming (my water balloon went straight over JC‘s head).

Then, we went over to storytime to threaten them with water balloons, but we were chased off with pitchforks and torches (figuratively, though if it had been literally, that would have been very interesting), so I sat down and listened to storytime instead.

Po’s storytime today was about starting a company. Essentially, a friend of his started a company in the early 2000s, so around 2014, he decided to start a company, expii.com. For the first many years (~8?) he was literally making no money and only losing money because there were no ads on expii.com. He upkept the website simply by asking lots of billionaires for money. Then, at some point, on his way to Bangladesh for something related to the website, he dropped by China because some company had been in contact with him and wanted him to record a video about math that they would sell to Chinese people.

Po thought that was a ridiculous idea, as he’d never been paid to talk about math before (other than at CMU, but according to him, that doesn’t actually count because it’s just tuition). But he did it, went to Bangladesh, and promptly forgot about the whole thing.

So naturally, it worked.

It sold quite well, so they contacted Po again and were like, wanna do this again?

So Po went back to try again and made a LOT of videos.

But he discovered that, apparently, the profit from videos was not linear with the number of videos: it was constant. This was because people bought a video due to curiosity, and then that curiosity was sated so they didn’t buy any more. Another issue was that, you know, Chinese people actually wanted classes in Chinese, while Po was, in fact, using English. hmmmmm.

So after that, he began going to China every maybe two months and giving talks around the country. In the first talk, the people asked if Po wanted a translator while he spoke in English. Po thought to himself, if I get a translator, that means the amount of stuff I can explain is halved. So he did it all in Chinese. Which is so incredibly impressive!

While I sat on the couches at night, someone went around pretending to use the spirit search, just asking everyone if they were the mafia. Then he got to me. I was like “Hhaaaa Nooooo” (but, you know, actually convincingly). RG was sitting next to me (on my left) and scrolling through his phone. He just so happened to be looking at the mafia graveyard participant list. So he looked at me with a quizzically amused expression, screen tilted toward me and finger underlining my name.

And then JC sat on my right giving me much less discrete amused looks.

Anyway, I know a lot more happened today but it was too long ago (this journal entry was written on June 19) so I don’t really remember.