June 22, 2022: Water Fight

Morning

I started doing the vlog! I sort of imagined it as a “day in the life of a MOPper” thing, where I’d start from morning to night and record a day. So when I woke up at waaay-too-early-in-the-morning, I started recording myself, like, waking up.

In the morning, while I was in the bathroom doing morning things and brushing my teeth and stuff, there was a lady on the other side of the room who I did not recognize. When I asked, she told me that she’s an RA for the pre-college camp that will be living in Stever after MOP ends. She came early to set up things and do training for that camp.

When she first told me, I was very confused. I thought “pre-college ra training” meant that she’s going to be an RA in a college dorm and needs to train for that. This left me very confused as to why they’re doing that now, when school starts in many months. I only figured out what she really meant based on context clues when I ran into some other pre-college RAs.

After breakfast, I walked with SR to class (his first class is with green). While we were walking, he asked me how much I know about statistics and the normal distribution. Then, the topic of sleep came up once again. I mentioned that I get around six hours of sleep at this point (because I sleep around midnight and wake up at six) and SR was like, “wOw, that’s a lot (for MOP).” I was like, “Not really? A lot of people get more sleep than me, I think.”

Then we got to class and ended that discussion.

Classes

The first class of the day was Catalan Numbers, taught by OS. Catalan Numbers arise when you consider the number of lattice walks in a square grid above the diagonal. It was very interesting. Then we started considering what other combinatorial objects might result in Catalan numbers (trees, tilings, weakly increasing sequences of numbers)

The second class of the day was Magical Probability, taught by SR.

I was very curious and asked everyone about their sleep. “Who sleeps

• 6 hours or more?”
  • Basically everyone raised their hand.
• 7 hours?”
  • Still almost everyone
• 8 hours?”
  • Still basically ⅓ or ½ of Red!

SR was like, “wOw.”

Apparently, blue gets an average of, like, 6, and black, like, 4? Idk. smth like that.

After that, we started actually getting into the topic of the class. First, he asked us to raise our hands if we knew what the “bell curve,” “normal distribution,” and “Gaussian distribution” are.

Most people raised their hands at bell curves, and then the hands just steadily decreased.

The three are the same. Exact. Thing.

Then, we went on to talk about what we know about the bell curve.

Someone mentioned it being the most sort of “basic” probability distribution there is, so Sasha wrote down its equation and was like, “basic?”

We talked about how, whenever we learn something, we should think: why is this useful, why is this helpful, why is this powerful?” 

For instance, generating functions are useful because “sometimes it’s easier to work with the whole thing than something smaller, like when you do induction and sometimes it helps to induct something else as well.

Another example is bell curves: you take any distribution and take many averages. If you plot the frequencies of the averages, this gives a bell curve. Isn’t that miraculous? And that is sort of what makes the bell curve so important that you see it everywhere, in memes and stuff.

Then we talked about WHY probability. Why do we learn probability? Why don’t we just consider it as fractions “good choices/all choices”? And, after much brainstorming, he told us his belief: probability is just a language. Humans find probability more intuitive. That is the only reason probability is useful and we don’t just write fractions.

I walked to lunch with SR and included him in my recording about lunch for the vlog.

The last class of the day was triangle configurations, taught by MR. Geometry sucks. 🙁

EB gave me some gum when we were in the third class.

After Class

After class ended, EB, EW, and HZ went walking, so I went with them. First they climbed the stairs in some random building near Wean (though I’m still unsure why they did that), reached the top, realized the door was locked, and went downstairs again. Then we wandered about campus for some time. It was very hot.

Eventually, I went to MIMO coordination at Tepper. Apparently, some people ate the ice cream at the shop inside Tepper, but by the time I got there, the shop had already closed 🙁 (and MIMO coordination was also basically over).

Since both RZ and MG have left MOP already, they didn’t have anyone to sign the MIMO coordination for the girls. I happened to be standing next to the table so Po was like, “Sophie! You should sign it!” So I did. Apparently, he sent the document to RZ and MG to see, so I wonder what they thought of it. 😛

On our way back from MIMO coordination (4:36 pm) (I walked back with FY and VinL) we saw a praying mantis on the ground!

Then, VinL figured out that, if you slightly unscrew the top of the water pump, it can become a water gun and squirt out a stream of water!!!

So FY and VinL were, ah, testing it out.

Anyway, lol.

Then, once we got back to the dorm, we went up to the second or fourth floor and started filling water balloons to assist Turtle. That is, we (FY, VinL, DiaL, RW) felt bad for Turtle and decided to rally with him against the immature majority. HJ was also on our side, which was a bit funny as he was one of the main rallying forces of the displeased majority and even came up with their slogan (Tilted Students Thoroughly Splash Turtle). Eventually, I grew bored and just sat down and started working on my journal. Meanwhile, Turtle was also upstairs with us and worked on his handout for a class he’ll teach Red and Green on Friday. Essentially, the handout was just way too long (I think there were like, a hundred questions or something?) and he needed to cut it down to something more manageable. I told him that it doesn’t really need to be cut down too much considering MR‘s Triangle Configuration handout had more than thirty questions, and Riddles are far more fun than geometry :P.

As I did this, SA (who, by the way, might still be uncleared, so I suppose we must consider her a stranger who snuck in through a window rather than an MAA affiliated staff member) sent on discord that she and Evan Chen were going to be in the meditation room kpop dancing.

Initially, I didn’t want to go downstairs because I was quite comfortable just sitting there typing stuff on my phone. Then, Turtle informed us that SA just texted him to ask him to at least go downstairs to watch them. That, in addition to RW‘s persuasion, convinced me to go downstairs. Thus, after finishing a few more sentences, we went downstairs to learn a kpop dance :).

K-pop Dance

The meditation room is a room across from the elevators with a wall of mirrors. I’ve noticed the existence of the meditation room before, but I never actually saw the point of actually going in because I didn’t know that there were mirrors. Now that I know, I swear to god I am going to use that room every single day when I wake up in the morning to dance. It is legit a beautiful room. Sadly, it requires a staff card to scan open, but that’s fine: Evan Chen says that he wakes up early and can open the door for me :).

Since it requires a staff card to open, we usually prop it open with a chair whenever we’re in there.

Anyway, when I went in with Turtle, RW, VinL, and DiaL on my tail, only SA and Evan Chen were inside. Then, some more people joined us: namely, OS and EB. We learned the intro to me gustas tu.

T’was fun 🙂

We were initially going to just perform all of me gustas tu at the talent show, but we decided that was too difficult. Instead, we’ll be learning a bunch of choruses and stitching them together. That way, not everyone needs to learn everything, they just need to jump on when they do know something.

(Honestly, looking back, I feel like this definitely ended up being more difficult than just doing all of me gustas tu, but it was fun.)

After that, we went to dinner.

The TSTST Water Fight

After dinner (7:38 pm), we all went outside for the great Tilted Students Thoroughly Splash Turtle water fight!

That is, those of us on Turtle‘s side went outside and sort of hung around waiting for the antagonistic student forces to arrive, as Holden had informed them that he was going to be out there waiting for them.

We waited,

And we waited,

And we waited.

It was futile: they would not show up. (They were getting noodles)

FY started attacking Turtle because he is a force of chaos. I decided to go in and fill a few more water balloons as ammo, so I took a fistful of FY‘s many unfilled balloons, put them in my pocket, and went inside. (I did not manage to fill all those balloons. I also did not remember to take them all out of my pocket. As such, when I next did my laundry, I somehow found a bunch of unfilled water balloons mixed in with my clothes I wOndEr whErE that came from).

Once I decided I had enough extra ammo and went outside, the noodle-goers had returned and had already begun their full frontal assault.

I, being a wonderful friend, come up from behind JW and I’m all like, “I brought reinforcements!”

Jessica was delighted. “Oh, good! Sophie—”

I turned and smacked one water balloon at her. Then I saw JC run toward us, so I threw the rest (four or five) at him. For once, my aim proved true: not a single shot missed. It was extremely satisfying.

JW turned upon me with a look of absolute betrayal, so I turned tail and RAN.

Somehow, I got my hands on one of the water-pump-made-guns and started spraying indiscriminately (which still all landed on the enemy, as enemy forces so greatly overwhelmed us).

Someone got it from me, and then I stole off to do a vlog in which I pretended to be a reporter.

Apparently, at some point, FY, who had been running around gunning people with his water pump, said to ES, “You look like a nice guy,” and gave it to ES. ES turned around and sprayed FY in thanks.

After that, we sang at singing troupe (though technically, the water fight started, it was already past 8, when singing troupe had been supposed to start :P).

The seminar today was canceled.

Discussion of DC Live

Po’s story time (topic: negotiation) was also canceled because not enough people wanted to participate.

Late that night, I see Po talking about something to JC, MLu, and DD. Curious about what they’re talking about, I wandered over and ask them. And just then, Po was showing them the DC Live discord channel! He was pointing at my name, which was offline :P. So I was like, why am I offline? I got on discord on my phone and felt very self-satisfied as I watched my status on his phone change from “offline” to “online.”

Po talked about why he loves Live. From what he says, he loves it because it’s a bunch of people who get together and want to do something, not just do really well at a math contest. Live is essentially where he collects together a bunch of high schoolers to teach math to middle schoolers. He’s almost always on the DC Live discord—when my friend was persuading me to apply for Live, pointed out that it was like having a direct connection to Po where he tells you advice to be successful in life. We have this math professor we know who is always willing to give us a step-by-step for what UNR classes to take. She said that Po was like him, except rather than UNR classes, he gives steps for being a good person :P.

He also talked about how we now have a bunch of high school students and not so many middle school students, so in a sense, the issue is that we’ll be accepting high school students at a slower rate just because we don’t have enough middle schoolers to teach at all.

Thus, he told JC, MLu, and DD (who all seemed rather interested in Live) that they should spread the word about DC Live in their own community. They started discussing what math circles or something they could spread the word in.