We lost to Four Rivers, but that is okay. Especially because a friend and I have organized a game of Calvinballtomorrow during lunch. It is going to be awesome. We have flags, bags, hobby horses, masks, a croquet set, and I am bringing all sorts of other things.
This weekend is the Greenfield ultimate tournament. We are in the A division again!
My academic load is finally starting to lighten up, for a variety of reasons. This morning, I turned in my joint honors paper for Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, under the title “British Finance and the Development of the Gold Standard”. Having that off our backs leaves us with having to plan the simulation we are going to run with the class to demonstrate some of the principles we studied. Students in the class will take on the role of merchants, buying and selling goods and currency, and attempting to make profit as regulatory and financial systems change. The simulation is pretty complicated, and we are turning in the plans for it on Wednesday.
I have, after much thought, decided not to do the AP Physics C exams. There is too much work remaining, and I have not done enough this year. I’m still going to try to finish my independent math study, but since that doesn’t have an AP exam attached to it, it should be significantly easier. I will need to kick it into gear, though, because I graduate in less than a month (AAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!). As of Friday, I will be done with Spanish, when I will have my presentation/evaluation with the head of the World Languages department and a Spanish teacher who will be assessing my independent work. I am expecting that to go well.
Up until now, I’ve been assigned to write a one-act play as a normal part of my Playwriting class, an another one-act for Honors in that class, as a collaboration between the Theater and History departments. That one-act would be used as a curriculum piece in the Holocaust Studies class in the Holocaust Rescue unit. However, after consulting with the teachers of those classes (who are the department heads), we’ve decided to make those two one-acts the same. In other words, the normal one-act I do for Playwriting will be the collaboration. The Playwriting teacher has also said that if it works well, he will not have a problem giving me Honors Credit, because of the collaboration and research aspects which would not be required in the normal one-act assignment. Once I get a good plot locked down, it should be pretty easy to write.
We have a Frisbee game tomorrow against Four Rivers. They are an excellent team. So are we. It is going to be an epic game.
I have registered for the NHCSummer Institute! I am taking Jonathan Rubenstein’s baking classand Ben Dreyfus’ shemitah class. This is going to be a fabulous Institute.
Today was the Northampton Pride march and rally. I took a longish lunch break to march with my school’s GSA, and then got some excellent food, including deep-fried cheesecake, which a friend and I sampled simply so we could say we had. It was not very good. The fried plantains and rice were, however.
And now, for the homework.
I have discovered how to make floating tooltips appear over a block of text. Or over anything, I suppose. The possibilities are endless.
I suppose this is a rather simple concept, but somehow I’ve never run across it before. I am PSYCHED! There is so much I can do with this! I will probably start implementing it very soon on this site. I will have to think about cool content to put there to keep people looking.
Tonight I am heading to the Annual Meeting of the Hilltown Cooperative Charter Public School, where I attended from fifth through eighth grade. Some members of my class (the class of 2006) have been asked to come talk about our experiences there, as we are all heading off to college and such places next year. I am looking forward to seeing a lot of people who I haven’t seen in a while, students and faculty. The part where we talk is not till about 7:20, but I am going for the whole thing beginning at 6:30. I have never been to one of these before, and I’m curious to see what goes on.
The HCCPSannual meeting was a great success. I ended up going with some friends separately from my mom. Afterwards, we went and got some ice cream (I had a root beer float) at Herrell’s. It was great to see everyone again, and I really liked being at the meeting. We talked a bit about ourselves, and our experiences at Hilltown, and then people asked us some questions. Overall, a wonderful evening.
I have a bunch of homework to finish up, and then I am off to catch up on some much-needed sleep.
It’s been a while since I wrote. I have been very busy and very tired.
The NMH tournament was awesome. We got destroyed (we were 0 and 5), but we won the Spirit of the Game award, with an unprecedented-at-that-tournament perfect score of 50/50, receiving a 10/10 from each of the five teams we played. We got a nice plaque, and everything. After the tournament, me and some friends, including one from NMH, went for a quick dip in the river.
That night I went to a late show at the Iron Horse, Gokh-Bi System. They are a sort of funk/hip-hop/fusion sort of band, with members from around here, and Senegal. They were great. They had three frontmen from Senegal, who would rap, sing, drum and also dance. They also had this sort of designated dancer dude who would come up onto the stage at certain times and do incredible dances. We danced a lot in the audience, and people were coming up on stage all the time to dance with the band, and throw money all over them. It was fabulous. I think I may buy some of their music from iTunes, now that it is DRM-free.
Sunday I went to see that same friend from NMH’s senior honors recital, which was also fabulous. He played two pieces with piano accompaniment (on violin and viola), and played viola in the string quartet he wrote. This was the first time that piece had been performed, and it was really good. He wrote it mostly this winter, immediately following the unexpected death of a friend from leukemia.
Two other students played at the recital, one on drums, and one on piano. Both were excellent, and after the show there was a reception with those sort of round wafers with chocolate filling in the middle, and strawberries. Also there was confectioners’ sugar to dip the strawberries in, which I had never done before, but which was great.
I have been getting very little sleep in the past few nights because of mounds of homework, which will continue tonight. With that in mind, I will say that Arlen Specter is a very brave soul.
RIP, Frankie Manning. We will miss you.
I am working on a pretty excellent shell scriptthat resets a Mac OS X computer back to factory defaults. This is useful for when I do a clean install at work and then need to install after-market software. I create an initial user account, install the software, and then run the script to remove the user, leaving the installed software in place and ready to use when a new account is created. As it is right now, the script does what it’s supposed to do. I think I will give it a few more features and make it a little prettier, and then put up a link to it here, as it could be pretty useful.
We have an ultimate tournament on Saturday at NMH. We are in the A division, which is cool because it will be really competitive and awesome, but not cool because a lot of our newer players will not get much playing time. That is a bummer. I went to the Y tonight and am going again tomorrow, so I will be in excellent shape on Saturday. I think it is important that I have been exercising regularly when the tournament comes around, so it is not a shock to my muscles to suddenly be doing work. I had an awesome workout tonight and am looking forward to another tomorrow. And now, sleep beckons.
It rained really hard on the way home today, and as the defroster in my dad’s car is broken, we were mopping the windshield with a sweater every few minutes. It was awful driving weather.
The actual day at Brown was really nice. I met some really interesting faculty, and learned a lot of really cool stuff. Since the program was designed for admitted students, not just those who are already comitted to the school, as I am, there was a fair amount of courting, which was annoying, but expected. Also, now that the students have been admitted, and the school is essentially trying to woo them into giving the school their money, the control shifts to the parents, who start asking all sorts of ridiculous and non-productive questions. At a certain point, it seems as though they don’t even really care about the educational component, they are just looking to put people on the defensive, because that is fun. It can be easy to fall into the trap of wanting to hear yourself talk when you are interested in something.
Anyway, I had a really good time despite all of that. Not only did I have some excellent conversations with various faculty members (chiefly in the Geology department), but I was fortunate enough to start a conversation with a senior who then offered to show me his thesis work, which was on historic wind and temperature changes in East Africa. It had all sorts of cool charts and studies involved, and he had a lot of interesting stuff to say about the department and the way science in general works at Brown. The main thing I gained today, from him and others, was a really good sense of how to navigate the departments and resources once I get there. I am really looking forward to begininning in the fall.
The conversation I began to have with some of the Geology faculty and continued somewhat with that student was about public policy. One thing they pointed out, that I agree with, is that Geology is very much a study of how humans can interact with natural cycles. In this way, it is extremely applicable to public policy. Or rather, public policy is extremley applicable to it. There is an abiding notion in politics that the best way to become, for instance, a statesperson and work in international relations is to study political science, and government, and stuff. I would agree that it’s important to understand how governments work, but if you’re going to go work for one, as, say, a broker of international environmental policy, you had better understand how nitrogen cycles work. Scientists are in a unique position to set and influence public policy, based on their formidable understanding of the way things work. Policy needs to be set based on scientific truths, not the other way around. If you decide what your policies will be and then look for science to back them, that is bad. It is data mining, and it is just general quackery. Science necessitates conclusions, and sometimes painful ones. Governments need to respond to that by setting policies that are based on scientific truths.
More and more, I am getting interested in some kind of intellectual property law, or something of that sort. For that reason, I am considering doing some kind of engineering major (perhaps Computer Engineering, which seems to be a strong division at Brown), and then going to law school, perhaps earning a Master’s degree in Engineering as well. Having a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering makes it easier to find work, which could potentially help me pay for law school and graduate school. I also really want to teach high school math, so I am definitely considering some kind of math major as well, perhaps dual.
Also, if I work hard on my investment plans for this summer, I could enjoy a lot more financial flexibility in the future in terms of education and career.
Things are starting to come together.
I set up my Brown email address! It redirects to my Gmail account, and I can send mail as it from there. This is awesome.
Tomorrow I am going to be at Brown for the day at a program for admitted students. I will get to meet people, see cool presentations, and such. I am also planning to spend a bunch of time in Providence and just generally browsing the campus to get a feel for it. This will be the first time I have visited since I was admitted, and I am looking forward to it.
Sleep is now my highest priority.
Everything That Happens Will Happen Today has arrived. Vinyl is fabulous. I highly recommend this album.
I didn’t get home until about three in the morning, so I took the day off from school today to sleep and catch up on work.
The concert was amazing. The orchestra itself was really cool; a blend of people from all different countries. The conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas, was incredibly fun to watch. He had more expression than almost anyone I’ve ever seen before.
Four ten-thousand-watt (I think) projectors covered the entire ceiling and back wall of the stage of Carnegie Hall. Before each piece, they would show maps of where the composer lived, as well as periodically showing videos about select performers from the orchestra, compilations of audition videos during intermission, and some really cool multimedia stuff during a few pieces. During John Cage’s Renga and Aria, for instance, they projected the shapes and syllables he used to notate the piece, which is pretty cool sounding. Will and I got a look at the control room for all of the video, and it was intense. There were racks and racks of complicated audio-video and computer equipment, and all sorts of things we didn’t understand at all.
The orchestra also played Ride of the Valkyries, which is pretty much the most epic piece of music ever.
For me, the two highlights of the performance were the Internet Symphony No. 1, Eroica, composed and guest-conducted by Tan Dun in its world premier, and a piece they did with Mason Bates, a really awesome electronic DJ. He played with the full orchestra. Dun’s piece had a part for car rims which were played with ball-peen hammers.
The irony of wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt in a concert hall named after Andrew Carnegie did not escape me, and I think it was responsible for my being rejected by an interviewer from the BBC, who I guess was looking for people more well-dressed than us. We were a rather odd-looking group.
We hung out in Times Square for a while beforehand, got some excellent food from a street vendor, bought some hip-hop (which we listened to on the way home), and almost purchased some Obama condoms (“Michelle approved, ladies and gentlemen”, and “Create your very own stimulus package”), but they were $5, which was not practical.
The YouTube Symphony Orchestra is a historic event, but not for the reasons I had originally been thinking of. In terms of the formation of musical groups, the real democratizer was the recording process. In that respect, this is really no different. But it does really represent the way that classical music, and, indeed, the idea of collaborative music in general, is changing in response to this type of technology. It opens up new ground for the way music can be composed, put together, and performed. I am excited to see where it goes from here, and I am proud to have witnessed this event.
Also, this post has more categories than any I have ever written before, I think. It is just that awesome.
Egg salad (made with fresh eggs) and Tabasco on matza.
Apparently there is a scientific measurement of how spicy something is. I wonder where my sandwich would rank on it.
Tomorrow I am heading to Carnegie Hall to see the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. It is a half-day at school, and since I normally have no classes in the morning on Wednesday, I am not going in to school at all. Will will be picking me up at home, we will grab another friend a couple blocks away, and then head to New Haven. From there, we will take the train into the city.
The show is at seven-thirty, so we are going to be back pretty late.
I have been doing a lot of thinking about how society is going to change as the effects of global warming play out and we run out of fossil fuels. We have a lot of thinking to do about how we want to restructure to avoid starving people. It is going to get a lot harder to feed people.
I think the solution is to start centralizing the population around farming areas, with efficient public transportation to allow people and goods to be efficiently moved within relatively small areas. Importing food from long distances is a luxury we cannot afford. Areas of the world that cannot be used efficiently for farming should become centers for power generation (by nuclear fusion ideally), and research into such techniques. That way, any safety concerns associated with running power plants will be removed from the population, and the land will be put to good use.
The current model of people living far-flung, away from distribution centers, and having to drive to get their food, is completely unsustainable. We need to create small, localized, microeconomies that are self-sufficient in terms of food. Electric power can be transported over long distances by the use of high-voltage lines, so it is no problem to create that thousands of miles away. But goods such as food can no longer be shipped long distances, because that is the source of most of the energy expenditure associated with them.
We also need to scale back on our use of commodities; we need to consume less. Some products require special facilities to be manufactured, and if we go through them too fast, we will waste energy getting them from place to place.
On the other hand, if we have enough clean energy, that won’t really be a problem. Nuclear fusion has the potential to produce an immense amount of energy with almost no harmful byproducts. If we harness more efficient electrical engines to power our machinery, we should be able to live comfortably without having a negative impact on the planet. That balance is the key.
There is no intrinsic disadvantage to modernization. The problem arises when we ignore the natural order of things, when we forget that as the dominant species, we are in a unique position to screw ourselves and everything else over with our tremendous influence on the planet. That influence is both our greatest asset and our greatest liability, and we must tread carefully around it.
I dug three holes, each three feet wide, and one-and-a-half feet deep. Two and half hours of work for a total of thirty dollars gives me twelve dollars an hour (not bad). But I wanted to calculate how much I was paid per volume of dirt (disregarding the rather substantial rocks I had to dig out and move).
So:
Three holes, with a radius of one-and-a-half feet, and a depth of three feet.
r2h = (1.5)21.5
3/2 ft.3dirt per hole.
Thirty dollars for three holes is ten dollars per hole.
10/(3/2)=20/(3) $/ft.3dirt 2.122065907891938 $/ft.3 dirt.
I bought David Byrne’s new album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Todayonline. So far, it is pretty awesome. I wish I had noticed the option to buy it in FLACas well as MP3, seemingly for no extra charge, but I didn’t. Oh well. I did buy the vinyl package, so in a few days I will receive the album on vinyl, which is going to be great.
Chinese food approaches. As does bimetallism.
Of course they would be closed on Easter Sunday. Why on earth didn’t I think of that?
I had planned my whole day around going to the Y in the morning, then work, then a mock trial meeting. But it turns out that the Y is closed, work is closed, and the meeting is not happening. It looks as though I will be going up to Ashfield to dig some holes in the morning. Then I will do homework before meeting with a friend to work on our honors project.
We had a Passover seder last night, which was pretty wild. A total of thirty-one guests were in attendance. The Manischewitzand the Dr. Brown’swere flowing fast, and a wonderful time was had by all. Tonight we are heading to the house of my congregation’s rabbi for a seder, which promises to be excellent.
Passover is a good time to reflect on a lot of different things. At this moment in particular, the idea of the way Jewish people relate to slavery and freedom is pretty important. The situation in Israel is, in my opinion, continually deteriorating. A foreign minister who believes that Israeli Arabs should swear an oath of allegiance to the Jewish state, a government that is increasingly willing to pursue military action before diplomacy and compromise, and an international assumption that the land is Israel’s to do with as it wishes; these are all huge obstacles to peace, and, in Jewish terms, Moshiach.
I do not agree with those who say that all Jews are responsible for what the state of Israel has done. That’s like white guilt; it’s polarizing and non-constructive. But I do think that, as Jews, we have a duty to stand up and say “Look, we’re not okay with what’s being done in the name of our religion.” We, the constituency of international Jewry (a FABULOUS word), are the strongest voice of conscience. I can’t speak for the views of Israeli Jews, many of whom I know do not agree with the way the government has approached these problems, just as many Americans despised the way George W. Bush treated the rest of the world, but I am not self-centered enough to pretend that I am the only Jew who is not blinded by fundamentalism. I am only one of many Jews who believe that [the] religion stands for something greater than its own personal gain; the betterment of humanity, whether or not the particular humanity is involved happens to be Jewish.
There are always people willing to use religion as a justification for their own racist or extremist ideals. I don’t distinguish between Avigdor Lieberman and a Muslim extremist who sets off a car bomb on an ideological level. Clearly there is a practical difference; it’s not illegal for Avigdor Lieberman to have views that I consider racist and it is illegal to blow people up. But it is immoral for Lieberman to be allowed to apply those values to a society in which he is in a position of leadership. Racist views have no place in government. Neither does religion.
In my household, we place a strong emphasis on having non-Jews at our Seders. We believe that is a mitzvahto share our traditions and celebrations with others, and to experience theirs. Coming from this place, I see it as central to the Jewish faith that Jews be willing to cooperate with others. Judaism places a high value on human life and dignity, and its intrinsic worth, and we must always prioritize that above all else. I strongly believe that religion can be a force for good, and that despite arguments about whose is “better”, who is the “true believer”, or if it’s even valid at all, we cannot discount the effect it has on many people. All persons of religion have a duty to deal with others on their terms. This means that a religion must not become insular and self-absorbed. It must prioritize the basic needs of others over its so-called “religious truths”.
There is a myth that a lot of American Jews support Israel’s generally conservative stance towards religious cooperation, but a new survey from JStreet finds that this is not true. It is clear that Jews have individually progressed. Judaism needs to follow. All religions, Judaism included, need to take their rightful place in the modern world, allowing their practitioners to maintain their reason, logicality, and respect for others. When any religion begins to cloud these things from view, this must be immediately addressed with progressive and productive dialogue.
I support the abolition of the state of Israel and the forming of a single secular state in the region. But this does not preclude me from dealing with and listening to those who support the state of Israel as a religious institution. Nor does it prevent me from having a close and personal relationship with that historic and significant area. I don’t view it as the Promised Land, but, being a person who picks and chooses from the history of the religion to suit my own needs, I understand the significance it holds for others, and would not take that from them. But we all must realize how our actions affect others. Jews do nothave more of a right to that land than any one else. Period.
Our plans changed rather suddenly this evening. We were not able to go to the rabbi’s house for dinner, so I instead went to our synagogue’s community Seder. And this was no ordinary seder. Deval Patrick himself, the governor of Massachusetts, arrived, and ate with us. I managed to corner him before he left, and talked to him about charter schools. I had heard that he opposed them (which I doubted, as it is an oversimplification), and he vigorously denied it as I had thought he would. He did make the very interesting point that what Massachusetts has not done such a good job of is using charter schools as “laboratories”, as he put it, and applying what we learn from these schools to the district system. Building off of this, I would say that the reason people are often angry about charter schools is because they don’t see any benefit to having them. If we look at charter schools as a government investment that allows a new perspective on public education, we see an immediate benefit, as long as those perspectives are used constructively. I don’t know what specific legal steps Patrick plans to take to make this more of a reality, but I appreciate the clarity of his goals, and his willingness to communicate them.
I got a photo with him, but I was using my mom’s celphone camera, and did not save it properly, so it is gone forever. So it goes.