We’re in the endgame now
So that was it.
It was the end of another week.
4 weeks earlier, almost a month ago, I woke up sleep deprived, then proceeded to hop onto my 5am flight, excited yet nervous, yet really looking forward to see what it’s like to live and learn with 35 brilliant colleagues.
4 weeks later, I woke up sleep deprived, then proceeded to realize it’s been 4 weeks since I’ve landed in this land of desert known as New Mexico, struggled yet laughed, and that it’s my turn to reflect on the experience through my blog post today.
Today, after I’ve managed to crawl out of my bed, I did my laundry. Ever since the Great Laundry Machine Theft and their recent return, we have been able to use them for free, without swiping our cards…even though there is card-swiping device on the machines. This might have been a major oversight, but [shrug]. Also, before the theft, there was only one functioning washing machine on our floor, but now all 4 works. So I guess something good came out of that week of cloth-rationing after all.
I ate some food I stole borrowed took from the dining hall last night, folded my clothes, and got started on this blog post.
After lunch, I went to the Bio Annex to work a bit on my OD code, but instead got distracted by Dr. R talking about his undergrad experience of studying abroad in France, and we ended up talking about how lucky young people are to still be able to pull all-nighters. As I am writing this post extremely tired at 11:30pm, I am extremely skeptical of my capability of doing so…
After the last swing dancing class of SSP, a bunch of us gathered to play the best best card game I have played: fish. Credit goes to my friend Yulian for introducing me to this game at SSP. Basically, each suite is divided into two to form a total of 8 half-sets. Participants are divided into 2 teams, and cards are distributed among all participants. The gameplay consists of members from each team asking members of the other team for cards, but only from a half-set that each member has cards in with the goal of making their team end up with complete half-sets. The twist is that everything is done without any communication, and in order to own a half-set, a person must know who in their team has which cards of the half-set. So, it really tests the memory skills of participants and has incredible strategic potential.
After dinner, we got together with Astro 1 to see the movie Hidden Figures. It was incredibly exciting to see bits of math we learned at SSP making their cameo in the movie, such as polar equation of ellipse and Euler’s method. It also contains Kennedy’s famous “we do things not because they are easy, but because they are hard” quote, which I personally usually interpret as:
But the work still needs to be done. Luckily, our next Pset is very exciting, as it constitutes the ultimate step to fully determining the orbit of our asteroid. The Method Of Gauss, known popularly as MOG, allows us to go from the RA and DEC of our observations to positions and velocity vectors of our asteroid. I made some progress on the code while being tired, so they will likely contain 10000 bugs that will take 3 hours to debug, but they are good enough for now. It’s time for bed
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Hi! I’m Harry, from a bunch of places but most recently Bellevue, Washington. I love learning new things but I’m most excited for math, physics, and programming. You can almost always find me doing FRC robotics related stuff (go NRG948!) including but not limited to coding the robot, strategizing, and bingeing matches.
