June 16, 2022: Philosophy

Breakfast

Yesterday, I’d asked my DA friends for help on what to respond to the troller with (the troller wrote “Number 16 burger kind foot lettuce,” which I had no idea what to do with). One of them suggested, “Sir, this is a Wendy’s,” so I sent that during breakfast.

Also, I sort of forgot to fill my water bottle with tea until fifteen minutes before class started. However, when I went to get tea, there were no tea bags left! So I sort of hopped from foot to foot in nerves and asked the staff if they had any tea anywhere. They told me that if I gave them five minutes, they could get some tea. At that point, they were rushing about trying to get me tea, so I felt like it would be rude to just leave. Therefore, I just stayed put, nomming on melons to rid my nerves.

At that point, EW arrived at Resnik. He woke up late, so by the time he arrived at breakfast, it was 8:50 am: ten minutes before the start of our first class. By the time he finished getting his food, I decided that I really should not wait any longer for tea because I was going to be late to class for heaven’s sake, so we rushed out the doors from the garage area. As we were running out (EW eating his scrambled eggs as we were doing so), we ran right past one of the staff members rummaging through a truck or something. He popped his head out and gave me a bunch of tea bags! What a great guy!

My water bottle had at that point been filled with hot water already, so I just shoved the tea bag in as we ran.

As we were going towards class, I saw AlW walking in front of us. At some point, VivL had figured out that AlW had the role of planeswalker, so we’d already trapped him and thus made him freely killable. Thus, I asked EW, absolutely innocently and not at all suspiciously, “Say, are you playing mafia?”

He was not.

Therefore, I ran forward, tapped AlW on the shoulder, and shouted “Bang!” 

R.I.P. AlW, who died around 8:50 am, on the way to class. Don’t go to class, kids!

Classes

We ended up being a tiny bit late to class. As we stood outside the door to class, we spent at least a minute arguing over who ought to go in first, as the first to enter will almost definitely receive more attention. Eventually, we just went in at the same time.

First, we had Geometry class with Evan Chen. It was absolutely terrible. He taught the class about DDIT, and though I somewhat understood while he was explaining, I couldn’t even come close to actually doing the problems. Geometry’s sooooo baaad (in AlW‘s tone. He (dottedcalculator orrrrz) has a very unique way of saying that. He’ll pull out a thumbs down and elongate the vowels).

The second class was linear algebra with RZ. That class was more fun, or at least more comprehensible. Mostly because with geometry, you’re expected to know some baseline (that I do not have) (this is also true for all competition math subjects, but my baseline is better in other competition math subjects), while when they’re teaching linear algebra or similar topics, none of the students are actually expected to know anything. Anyway, RZ‘s class itself was about showing that, given k values that a k-degree polynomial takes on, there’s only one such polynomial. We used the null space to prove this.

RW was constantly being like, SoPhIe, you’re older than us and wiser than us, you’re our 师姐, show us the methods of how to solve these problems! (She did this in the DDIT class as well) Of course I was like, yes, but I’m still stupid :(. But she persisted, lol.

After RZ‘s class, we went to lunch at Resnik. Po was there, so we spent some time talking to him. (The way I sit during meals at Resnik is: usually, I’ll sit with EB, RW, and EW, and whoever else is with us (often JW, though she sometimes sits with the blue/black). If Po is there, I’ll sit with Po, and if Turtle is there, I’ll sit with Turtle. And later, once I join the TJ gang, I’d often sit with them.)

Then, we went to Philosophy, which was basically a crowd of around ten to fifteen children crowded around two staff members and just asking the staff anything. My Philosophy was with Po and FW, and it soon devolved into Po sort of just telling us Harvard is better than MIT 😛

Ok, jk, that’s not exactly what he was saying. He just said that it’s very easy to tell the difference between the MOPpers who go to Harvard and the MOPpers who go to MIT, and the ones who go to Harvard actually come out of college obviously different. He said that, essentially, Harvard has more interesting, diverse people. Like, according to FW, there was this one student in his dorm who used to be a wrestling champion and then decided to do math.

But, like, I honestly think aI’ve been persuaded. Like, MIT has always been my dream school, yet now Harvard may just have taken its spot and it’s really, really confusing.

Once we finished philosophy, we all returned to the dorm. The TJ kids decided to do water balloons, so I helped him fill a few and throw some. I talked to the TJ kids (and VinL and DiaL) for a while, just standing around outside the front door of Stever and chatting. We talked about water fights. We eventually decided that, considering how poor all our aim is, we could make thousands of water balloons and still not have enough ammo. We decided that, in the case of an all-out water fight, we should get some waterguns, instead. But then we realized that water guns are actually, you know, expensive, so we agreed to just dump cups of water over one anothers’ heads.

Water Balloons

At some point, JC walks over and he talks about something he did yesterday morning at six in the morning. I was very confused because I remembered he’d written on his blog (which I only started following after I caused his death in mafia and befriended him) that he’d only woken up after seven. When I brought this up, he told me he bs’d most of it!!!!!

Apparently, not only does he bs the time and just report basically random times, he also bs’s the names: he RNGs the names of six of his friends so that every time he needs to mention doing something with his friends, he just picks a few random friends and puts those names on the blog.

And I’d been impressed by how well he remembered things !!!!

(This convo took place at approximately 4:43 pm. I actually know this time without bs’ing because I took a photo of JC struggling with his backpack, so ha!)

Anyway, then JC wanted to do water balloons, so I joined him for that.

As we were filling up water balloons, it began to look like it was going to rain. At first, I hadn’t wanted to be hit by water balloons because I literally had no clothes left. Besides the clothes on my back, all my clothing were in the laundry at that point, so if I got wet, I would have nothing to change into. However, once we realized that it was apparently going to rain, I decided to volunteer to be hit by water balloons, anyway. We went to a trash room (there’s a trash room on each floor next to the elevators), got a trash bag so we had something to transport all the water balloons with, and went outside for a round of water balloon throwing. JC and I volunteered to get hit, but somehow, JC got completely soaked while I only got half of me (the half closer to JC, to be specific) soaked. 

Dinner

Then, JC texted MLu to ask if the food at Resnik was good. Apparently, MLu claimed that the food was good (the pasta sauce, specifically?), so we decided to go to Resnik. Some other dude also came with us. On the way over, Mom called me, so I got on a call with her. She once again brought up buying MX boba tea in order to thank him for bringing my pillow (we didn’t feel like stuffing a huge pillow into a suitcase, so she got MX‘s mom to bring it for me). At this point, JC had brought us into some room in Resnik with AC that he used his keycard to scan into (it was really hot outside) and I had collapsed onto a couch in that room. So, collapsed on the couch and staring at the ceiling and trying not to sigh at my mother, I asked JC if he knew if MX liked boba tea.

And that some other dude goes and says, “I wouldn’t mind.”

I shoot to my feet and stare at him. It was MX. “WAIT You’re MX!” I gasp.

It was horrifically embarrassing. Then, I tell him, “My mom wants me to buy you boba tea to thank you for the pillow you brought.”

And so then he’s also horrifically embarrassed, so all was well (and the boba tea never did happen).

Anyway, then, we finally got to Resnik. And we couldn’t find the food! Usually, when you walk into the dining hall, the salad bar is near the entrance on the left, the hot buffet is on the left but further from the entrance, the drink dispenser is near the entrance on the right, the chef’s special is further from the entrance on the right, and then the dessert bar is set up on a little table directly across from the entrance. But that day, there was nothing on the left except for the salad bar! So we thought that the food wasn’t ready yet. We walked to the garage and sat there for a while and complained to MLu that he lied to us. He laughed at us a bit. Then, we noticed that some other people actually had food, like, buffet food! So we were like, where did you get that? And they told us it was in the dining hall, and when we got back, we saw that the hot buffet was moved to the right, even further from the entrance than the chef’s special. We’re so blind 😛

Jane Street

The Jane Street talk after dinner was actually interesting! It was actually about math (which already makes it better than the Two Sigma talk). The talk was on combinatorial games, to be specific, and we spent most of the time talking about various variations on the game of Nim. She called students up to the front to demonstrate the games many times, and it was very fun. The woman who gave the talk is a girl that Po actually knows, and he was very shocked and excited to see her. Her name is Nitya Mani, a math PhD student and a Hertz Fellow. Also, we got free T-shirts and rubik’s cubes, which also automatically increases how interesting the talk was :p.

During singing troupe, we saw a lot of interesting clouds in the sky. It was very pretty.

There was no storytime today because Po was entertaining the Jane Street speaker for dinner.

Panel

Instead, the students hosted an exercise panel!

I think the speakers were JC, AZ, and EX. I didn’t actually watch the whole thing, just the last ten or twenty minutes. After singing troupe, I decided to go inside because I figured an exercise panel would be boring and I wanted to play cards or do something else fun before going to bed. I peeked out near the end, though, because I was curious.

I sort of regret not spending the entire time outside, though, as when I went out, JC was doing a thousand lunges and I would very much like to know the context behind it.

Then, JC was like, his motivation for exercising is that he wants to touch things so he runs to touch them. It’s very sus 😛

Someone then got their hands on JC‘s hat and we started chasing one another for the hat.

At night, when Po got back from entertaining the Jane Street speaker, he started playing ping pong! It was very interesting. He plays with such style! Like, he does this thing where he literally jumps when he hits the ball!!!