a vapor in the wind.

The song this title is sourced from reflects metaphorically the insignificance of man in relation to God - explicitly as far as time and space are concerned, as well as probably implicitly in other areas as well. From this, it seems reasonable to extrapolate this to the idea that the actions of a man, or even man, are insignificant as far as the universe is concerned. This feeling of insignificance does not mean that we should not be responsible for our actions since they produce little change, whether positive or negative; indeed, this does seem to be a reason why some of us aim for Christlikeness, or to live with a "clear conscience", with "good morals", etc.

I'm not too sure why I thought of this, or thought of writing the above paragraph...

---

I finally finished scripting Extreme Heat Rhapsody (a TNN-touhou game), at least a reasonable demo of it. Six stages are completed, albeit only on one difficulty, with two possible choices of player characters. Assuming time allows, I will add a stage 5.5, of course the usual Extra and Phantasm stages, as well as more player-character options and of course additional difficulties.

Dean's Lists have been pretty okay; Math is on series and differential equations and time seems to pass very fast. Physics not so because we've been taught about the content in Olympiad, at least most of it up to this 2nd Lesson, including the Galilean and Lorentz (sp?) Transformations.

jk.

focal point

Company Camp was a surprisingly good experience - initially, I wasn't really looking forward to it as it seemed to not fit very well with the Dean's Lists and other classes I'd be having over the previous week as well as this week. Most importantly, I'll remember the four messages that I was around for, shared by the various Officers as well as during Church.

I arrived on the second morning, as a result of having Physics the day before. The first day ran in a rather uncomfortable way, I must admit, seeing as I did not know the other members of Philippi that well at that time. I had a lot of duties, further exacerbating this problem - I was involved in running the Drill War Games for Xi Min, as well as performing carpark ushering. The potluck had an embarrassing mistake (sp? gosh i can't spell simple words) in that we took the scouts' pizza, though it was a good thing that we were able to resolve it relatively quickly. The (third) day wasn't very eventful.

Though the Coy Blog hasn't been launched and I don't know what's going to happen to it, I did receive a compliment with regards to it from one of the Officers who's left the company, and whom I have a lot of respect for, so I guess that brightened my experience to some extent as well.

Through this camp, the things I'll remember are basically the four messages, as well as the worship sessions. In summary, though I did not really enjoy this camp that much (on a transient level), it was spiritually a good experience, and did stimulate me to think about what really matters, after drifting for quite a while.

jk.

lessons

You are forever in my life,
You see me through the seasons.
Cover me with Your hand,
And lead me in Your righteousness.
And I look to You, and I wait on You,

I'll sing to you Lord, a hymn of love
For Your faithfulness to me
I'm carried in everlasting arms
You'll never let me go, through it all.

---

This exam period, and the results that followed, I can definitely say was a period I'd best describe as learning.

I scored 38 points. This isn't particularly good or bad, it's the kind of in-between, slightly-good yet disappointing result. HLs were good as usual; triple sevens and all possible Dean's Lists were sealed. (I did get owned by Jarrel for Math by 7.5 or so marks, even though I got second place.) SLs, on the other hand, weren't so good, especially SL English which was a major flop.

SL1 English - 5
SL2 Chinese - 6
SL3 Econs - 6
HL1 Math - 7
HL2 Comp Sci - 7
HL3 Physics - 7

The pattern is interesting. Although I noted with Levin during Physics Olympiad today that we both had sequential patterns in our grades (one 5, two 6s, three 7s), I didn't realise mine was really in sequential order! Oh well.

English was terrible. My Unseen got 14, which is the lowest I've ever got this year even though I thought I did a pretty good job on it. I guess I'll have to see Ms Runima or something to go through it, and find out what happened. Set Text got 15 which admittedly was my fault, seeing as I had run out of time - as I did mention somewhere here I had to cut 5 to 4 and then to 3 angles. So essentially I wrote just 60 percent of what I had to say, and in fact less cause I had to cut off and shorten some points due to a lack of time. At least I avoided Focus Camp.

Chinese was so-so. Paper 1 crashed terribly, and though my Paper 2 wasn't bad (23/30), I realised that I should have gotten 26-27 instead as I lost 1 mark for formatting (O_O) and furthermore left out one section out of 7 completely. I'll have to remember: 开头，目的，地点，活动，时间，需要注意的东西，结尾/联络. Grrr. At least I know zhi nan or tong gao are good questions to tackle now...

Econs was strange. I still am not too sure why I'm wrong. The essay part b was basically about how governments can ride an economy out of a recession. I chose not to write about monetary policy, seeing as the question said specifically 'governments' and NOT 'the central bank'. So I got a 7/15 for it. My DBQs went 16-16 and the first part of the essay was a 7/10, so I guess IF I didn't read too much into the question the 7 would be more than safe. I don't feel too bad; getting 70.4 despite messing up this question mean that 75 should be easy if I got things the right way round.

Not too much to say about HLs though, other than I need to work more quickly in Math as I ran down the clock on both of the papers, and for Physics and Comp Science I need to watch out for stupid mistakes rather than just rushing. Levin's idea in Physics Olympiad, that you can sometimes, if unsure, write a big equation and then suddenly collapse it to the answer actually DID get me marks for one of the Math questions, so... =)

What I mean:
(Physics)
'State the Rayleigh Criterion.' [1 mark]
ANS: theta = 1.22lambda / b
(Clarification: That is NOT the Rayleigh criterion. The Rayleigh criterion refers to a situation when 2 sources are just resolvable, where the central maximum of the EM wave produced from one source coincides with the 1st minimum of the wave from the other source.)

---

Initially, this exam when I got the results I was terribly disappointed. I wanted to sort-of break down, but didn't. I spoke to a friend after school on Friday, we talked for a while about results and perspectives. Thanks :)

I guess now, I feel quite okay about my results especially since I've learnt stuff from the papers that went wrong.

jk.

fall

post exam, crash period again.

adrenalin levels low, cannot do work, CAS documentation, Econs Commentary, Extended Essay work and datacollection, etcetera.

grrr =(

---

The past few days have been spent in a way different from what I'm normally used to; in fact, in some way the Physics Olympiad training sessions have been essentially keeping some sense of order and drive in the day. Because of these sessions, I don't sleep TOO late (2 am max).

Today was very unusual though. Normally, I notice I have more problems with figuring out which equations to apply, rather than calculating and simplifying data once said equations are found. I couldn't do basic division for nuts today...

n1 + n2 = 37/25 = n3 + n4
(some working later)
hence 12n1*17 = 5n4
n4 = 12*17/5n1

(cancellation)
hence 12n1*17 = 5n4
n4 = 5/(12*17) n1

(noticed i missed out some division earlier)
hence 12n1 = 5n4
n1 = 12/5n4

(finally)
n1 = 5/12n4

seriously. 4 tries to get some rather easy question right...

Thermodynamics isn't really my kind of physics topic though I guess I'm fine with it.

I was rather light-headed today when I went for lunch. Probably the physics, as well as a book I bought yesterday from Kino called 'Killer Sudoku: Vol 4'. Like regular sudoku except there are no numbers in the grid, but there are various shapes marked out on the grid in which we know the total. Consequently, it ends up becoming a Kakuro-Sudoku hybrid, both of which I've done individually though not together. It was very interesting though, even though I failed the par time by 22 sec on the first puzzle I did. Good thing is, 4th puzzle (par time 16:00) took just 7:59. I feel quite good about THAT one.

---

For some reason, I thought of a rather strange math question:

Three bullets are fired out such that the smallest angle between any 2 of the bullets is 120 degrees. After reaching a distance 10 cm from the origin, the bullets start to undergo motion in a planar circle with constant angular velocity 0.1 degree s-1.

a) If the radius of this “circle” doubles after each revolution, increasing uniformly relative to an expression in terms of the radius of the existing circle, show clearly that the rate of change of distance from the origin is given by

dx/dt=lg2/45 * 2^(t/3600 - 3)

b) Suppose one of the bullets is fired due east, show that the bullet's position relative to the origin may be defined by the parametric equations

x= 10 cos (t/Q)

y = 10 sin (t/Q)

Hence or otherwise solve the value of Q.

There was a part c that wasn't finished as at time of writing...

---

jk.

Riverside View

Looking at it, it's just 2 more real exam days and it'll be over.

I feel bad; this end has come too soon for me I think. Typically, exams mark the end of the academic year for me, and hence I'll reflect on what I did, taking the point of view of schoolwork. Academically, I've backslid this year in many ways than one. The concentration and efficient use of time and resources present in sec 4 just doesn't feel right anymore.

Perhaps it was 4.9. The heavily competitive environment there made doing well in pretty much anything a decent challenge. Then again, 5.14 is one of the best environments for me to be in as well, if you want to look at it that way - judging from the PSC scholarships thingy, our class has 3 out of 8 (ridiculous overproportion) places. However, a net result is still that I've not been paying so much attention to academics and my work, but this is not just about 4.9 or 5.14...

This can be partially attributed to somewhat increasing involvement in the BB as well as in the two Olympiad teams. However, in the end I really do wonder, at times, what I have gained from these experiences. With regards to BB; there have been many times that I find that I'm doing things because they're there, as a duty cause of chairman position or technical skill, without seeing how they come into play in creating a big picture. Being involved in Logistics and the company blog do seem to be largely individual/small-group projects, anyway. The Olympiad knowledge is good, yet at times it still feels very disconnected, probably because I haven't been able to attend much of my Physics trainings, and much of the topics discussed for Math are either rather broad topics (e.g. series and sequences, AP-GP, trigonometric identities) that can be linked up, or small ones for which this is hard (e.g. pigeon hole principle, Chinese remainder theorem).

In any case, there are 2 more exam days left, both important HL papers (math-2 and comp science) so I'll try and do my best to make the most of them.

going for 100 for paper 2 after the crap paper 1,
jk.

Exams 2008 - part 1

I've never felt so screwed for an exam before... =(

CHINESE: Incredible fail. Paper 2 was fine, but paper 1 was like wtf compared to the other paper 1s in the IB book. I usually get 36-38 out of 40 for those in the past yr question book, but i'll be happy to take like... a 32 for this paper.

ENGLISH p1: ok this wasn't too bad. Prose was handle-able, poem looked workable but prose seemed easier. i don't think i'll do too badly, but i don't know if it'll be enough to cancel out the paper 2 crap that i wrote... hopefully i can still get a 6 (17/25). if i don't get at least 5 (14/25), i'll cry.

ECONS p1: grr screwed up the part (a) cause i didn't study 4.1 that well, got the definition of expenditure approach for 2 sector economy wrong. fortunately i still remembered how to define GDP correctly. part (b) was fine, but i only wrote about fiscal and no monetary policy, which i think is right but i'm not sure, since monetary policy is central bank and not government...

ENGLISH p2: no time. question on characterisation in Siddhartha and Huck Finn. i knew the points, but i screwed up cause i wrote for really long about plot, so in the end i had to change analysing the question from five angles to four and then to three. grrr!

ECONS p2: data response. hmm i did the questions on rising prices of oil and commodities, and the lower lea valley in the london olympics. i had trouble with the definitions, but i think other than that should be acceptable. not good, but acceptable. i hope.

PHYSICS p1: mcqs, not much to say. looks like i got 1 wrong according to bryan. but i'm not too sure also, and in any case it seems quite decent compared to a lot of other people's mcq, so...

PHYSICS p2: option G question was seriously wtf at first until some inspection and thought. then i got the common pressure question wrong, sadly. at least the copper-pot fail one i got right. and the first of the B questions, the one on the regular part of waves. THAT was ok...

MATH p1: incredibly shocking and hard. 14a was a really ??? question (i didn't even see 1st part, fortunately i did manage to achieve some progress by taking the result of area and then calculating the value of theta for which it was acceptable) so i'll at the very least get a few N marks and maybe 1 or 2 M marks for that 9 mark question. some of the questions really looked like a calculator would be nice. ah well other than jarrel i don't know of anyone who finished this paper proper... and of course, the irritating bit is that there's still p2 and we're going to have to count this crap p1 result...

anyway i need to get back into a study mood for comp science and math part 2. given how bad paper 1 went, i better get close to 100 for paper 2. comp science is a just-whack paper... see how.

disturbingly, the exam structure for me sort of has been reminding me of the subterranean animism stage 4 boss battle (jonny, herrick and i dunno who else would know). but basically you're fighting a boss that uses 3 simple patterns and then suddenly, the difficulty jumps into utter crap. granted for me i can't say its true that i find my HLs (the later 3) more complex than my SLs (the first 3) - seriously, english A1 SL is worse than math HL for me - but it feels like that in some way, because essentially the stakes are different. for SLs, the key goal is to avoid focus camp; for HLs, it's to land a spot on the dean's list. hence yeah. diff stakes.

jk.