The HMMT entry
Feb. 20th, 2005 05:17 pmThe way up there wasn't particularly noteworthy.
At the hotel we played EAC, Munchkin, Bridge, Spades, Durak... nothing particularly noteworthy. Except that I ripped a hole in the knee of my pants. My mom, thankfully, was able to sew it back up, though it reopened again the next day. Oh well. And so I closed the curtains and went to bed. Or I would have, except that the curtains wouldn't close. Not that the machine was jammed - the rails they were on simply did not extend far enough for them to be closed. "Oh great, we're going to be woken up by the sun."
As it turned out, our 6:00 wakeup was before sunrise anyway. And so I got changed and went down to breakfast.
There were no serving forks/spoons evident, so I simply took my fork and stuck it into a pancake in an attempt to pull it out. When the pancake started coming apart, revealing that inside it was more liquid than solid, I was a bit surprised and very disgusted. OK then... the eggs? ...no. The bacon? Its stench could be smelled from across the room, even by me. I eventually wound up eating some of the potatoes, which burned my throat (and, of course, there wasn't enough orange juice to go around).
And so, underfed, we went off to HMMT.
Oh yeah, this year our teams went: μ 1, μ 2, α 3, α 4, α 5, α 6, α 7, θ 8, Prefrosh 9, θ 10, θ 11. 11 teams, named awfully. μ 1 consisted of me, Tom, Rajesh, Fan, Hyun-Soo, Chris, James Choi, and Aaron, who doesn't go to our school but who shows up for math practice anyway, and who is actually a senior but looks like a junior.
First, the individual rounds. We were having a bit of trouble finding 34-101, but we just happened to run into Connie and Li-Mei who led us to it. We also found Dan Rubin and Matt Tai there, as well as Pasha, who Tom and I both thought had graduated. Someone said they had seen Eric (we had, too, actually) and I asked if they meant Frackleton or Stansifer, forgetting Frackleton had graduated.
So, first (for me and Tom) was Algebra, which I did just plain awful on. A mere 7. It was supposed to be really hard this year, but... you know, why do I keep taking the Algebra? I never do any good on it. Oh well.
I knew my geometry was really rusty, so I had decided to take Combinatorics instead - which I actually ended up doing better than Tom on, as he made a bunch of stupid mistakes. I got 24, which, my mom later told me after looking at the website, actually put me in 10th on Combinatorics. (They only announced top 3 in the individual awards, to save time.)
Next off to the team round. They had people there to lead you to the various buildings, but Tom, Aaron and I kind of waited a bit too long... well, we found building 8 ourself eventually, and actually got there before the rest of our team did.
Next, lunch! Chris and I had meant to meet up with Matt and Steve and Mung, but we couldn't find them. "Maybe we should have picked somewhere to meet," I said. (Checking my email, we actually did; Oh well.) So, we went to eat at the student center, where we ran into Eric. So we ate, but rather than going back for the mini-events, we just headed over to the game room over there, where we saw some DDR master get a AAA on Waka Laka on Heavy, and, in 2 games, quickly discovered that Aaron is a foosball master. Actually we figured that much out in considerably less than 1 game. Chris and I managed to score on him (and Josh) once, in both games.
Next, the Guts round! They told everybody to sit in rows rather than clumps, but we sat in a clump anyway. While waiting for the Guts round to start, we found Dan Fudenberg in front of us, ran into Shiyang, Jon Chu, Jae Bae, and Eve, some guy asked us about Annie (see two entries ago), and finally found Matt, whose team had exploded. We decided Chris would be runner, since his voice was out. I'm told Fan and Rajesh spent most of the round fighting each other about one of them sticking gum on the other. Yay. For us, we didn't do all that well - 6th place, just one point behind TS47.
Final results and awards:
We got 3rd overall, for which we each got Frisbees, with TJ in second and Exeter winning. Mr. Holbrook, I'm told, was not too disappointed - we even stopped for dinner. :P &mu 2;, meanwhile, won Division B.
We got 5th in the team round, and a bunch of individual awards - mostly Tom and James Choi, but also Hyun-Soo and Aaron.
They didn't announce mini-event results this year...
Everyone was wondering afterwards who this "TS47" team was that did so well. I still don't know.
We saw Genya walking around on the stage.
One of the people winning an individual award was named Xiao Fan, and it took me a moment to remember that Xiao had graduated and this was obviously not the same person. (It wasn't.)
Strangeness: α 7 got an award, but for what I don't remember. Some think it was a misread "α 4".
So, heading out, we ran into Matt, Steve, and Matt's parents. Matt's parents asked us how our school was big enough to send 11 teams. "It's not, we just mostly send bad teams." They took our picture, which Matt sent to us, and which I'd post here if I had somewhere to put it, portland.co.uk apparently being down right now.
On the way back, I started rereading the Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy on the bus; I had taken it because I wanted something I knew I wouldn't finish. It also meant I got to show the table of contents to Henry and to Molly. :) Ben saw it and said something like, "Oh yeah, that seems to be a popular book these days," but I think he was thinking of In Search of Schrödinger's Cat, which is one of those books that tries to explain quantum mechanics for laypeople and which Dr. Ostfeld has people read for his Senior Topics in Chem class (which I didn't take).
I'll end this entry with something completely unrelated. (Quotes approximate) A while back, sometime during Comp Sci, Avi was having trouble with the computer and asked me to help. "This happens every now and then," he said. "It acts like I'm holding the shift key down, but I'm not. Caps Lock isn't on; Caps Lock is working normally, and it's not just letters that are getting shifted." "...maybe you should try hitting shift to unstick it." It never occured to him that the shift key might actually be stuck. It was.
-Sniffnoy
[0]There's got to be a word for this, but I really can't think of it right now.
--
"Assume a spherical ant."
-Hayn Park
At the hotel we played EAC, Munchkin, Bridge, Spades, Durak... nothing particularly noteworthy. Except that I ripped a hole in the knee of my pants. My mom, thankfully, was able to sew it back up, though it reopened again the next day. Oh well. And so I closed the curtains and went to bed. Or I would have, except that the curtains wouldn't close. Not that the machine was jammed - the rails they were on simply did not extend far enough for them to be closed. "Oh great, we're going to be woken up by the sun."
As it turned out, our 6:00 wakeup was before sunrise anyway. And so I got changed and went down to breakfast.
There were no serving forks/spoons evident, so I simply took my fork and stuck it into a pancake in an attempt to pull it out. When the pancake started coming apart, revealing that inside it was more liquid than solid, I was a bit surprised and very disgusted. OK then... the eggs? ...no. The bacon? Its stench could be smelled from across the room, even by me. I eventually wound up eating some of the potatoes, which burned my throat (and, of course, there wasn't enough orange juice to go around).
And so, underfed, we went off to HMMT.
Oh yeah, this year our teams went: μ 1, μ 2, α 3, α 4, α 5, α 6, α 7, θ 8, Prefrosh 9, θ 10, θ 11. 11 teams, named awfully. μ 1 consisted of me, Tom, Rajesh, Fan, Hyun-Soo, Chris, James Choi, and Aaron, who doesn't go to our school but who shows up for math practice anyway, and who is actually a senior but looks like a junior.
First, the individual rounds. We were having a bit of trouble finding 34-101, but we just happened to run into Connie and Li-Mei who led us to it. We also found Dan Rubin and Matt Tai there, as well as Pasha, who Tom and I both thought had graduated. Someone said they had seen Eric (we had, too, actually) and I asked if they meant Frackleton or Stansifer, forgetting Frackleton had graduated.
So, first (for me and Tom) was Algebra, which I did just plain awful on. A mere 7. It was supposed to be really hard this year, but... you know, why do I keep taking the Algebra? I never do any good on it. Oh well.
I knew my geometry was really rusty, so I had decided to take Combinatorics instead - which I actually ended up doing better than Tom on, as he made a bunch of stupid mistakes. I got 24, which, my mom later told me after looking at the website, actually put me in 10th on Combinatorics. (They only announced top 3 in the individual awards, to save time.)
Next off to the team round. They had people there to lead you to the various buildings, but Tom, Aaron and I kind of waited a bit too long... well, we found building 8 ourself eventually, and actually got there before the rest of our team did.
Next, lunch! Chris and I had meant to meet up with Matt and Steve and Mung, but we couldn't find them. "Maybe we should have picked somewhere to meet," I said. (Checking my email, we actually did; Oh well.) So, we went to eat at the student center, where we ran into Eric. So we ate, but rather than going back for the mini-events, we just headed over to the game room over there, where we saw some DDR master get a AAA on Waka Laka on Heavy, and, in 2 games, quickly discovered that Aaron is a foosball master. Actually we figured that much out in considerably less than 1 game. Chris and I managed to score on him (and Josh) once, in both games.
Next, the Guts round! They told everybody to sit in rows rather than clumps, but we sat in a clump anyway. While waiting for the Guts round to start, we found Dan Fudenberg in front of us, ran into Shiyang, Jon Chu, Jae Bae, and Eve, some guy asked us about Annie (see two entries ago), and finally found Matt, whose team had exploded. We decided Chris would be runner, since his voice was out. I'm told Fan and Rajesh spent most of the round fighting each other about one of them sticking gum on the other. Yay. For us, we didn't do all that well - 6th place, just one point behind TS47.
Final results and awards:
We got 3rd overall, for which we each got Frisbees, with TJ in second and Exeter winning. Mr. Holbrook, I'm told, was not too disappointed - we even stopped for dinner. :P &mu 2;, meanwhile, won Division B.
We got 5th in the team round, and a bunch of individual awards - mostly Tom and James Choi, but also Hyun-Soo and Aaron.
They didn't announce mini-event results this year...
Everyone was wondering afterwards who this "TS47" team was that did so well. I still don't know.
We saw Genya walking around on the stage.
One of the people winning an individual award was named Xiao Fan, and it took me a moment to remember that Xiao had graduated and this was obviously not the same person. (It wasn't.)
Strangeness: α 7 got an award, but for what I don't remember. Some think it was a misread "α 4".
So, heading out, we ran into Matt, Steve, and Matt's parents. Matt's parents asked us how our school was big enough to send 11 teams. "It's not, we just mostly send bad teams." They took our picture, which Matt sent to us, and which I'd post here if I had somewhere to put it, portland.co.uk apparently being down right now.
On the way back, I started rereading the Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy on the bus; I had taken it because I wanted something I knew I wouldn't finish. It also meant I got to show the table of contents to Henry and to Molly. :) Ben saw it and said something like, "Oh yeah, that seems to be a popular book these days," but I think he was thinking of In Search of Schrödinger's Cat, which is one of those books that tries to explain quantum mechanics for laypeople and which Dr. Ostfeld has people read for his Senior Topics in Chem class (which I didn't take).
I'll end this entry with something completely unrelated. (Quotes approximate) A while back, sometime during Comp Sci, Avi was having trouble with the computer and asked me to help. "This happens every now and then," he said. "It acts like I'm holding the shift key down, but I'm not. Caps Lock isn't on; Caps Lock is working normally, and it's not just letters that are getting shifted." "...maybe you should try hitting shift to unstick it." It never occured to him that the shift key might actually be stuck. It was.
-Sniffnoy
[0]There's got to be a word for this, but I really can't think of it right now.
--
"Assume a spherical ant."
-Hayn Park
