Still Alive?

I face-planted on the ice today… is how I wanted to start last week, but I kind of got sidetracked when I suddenly remembered that I'm also taking an online programming class this semester and I hadn't gone through any material for the whole week. It's a slow process, but I've been trying to organize my life better so I can make good use of my free time. All-nighters two Thursdays in a row, and it's just the beginning of the semester! At the pace I'm going, I won't survive when we get to the harder stuff. Something's got to change.

Let me take you through all that's gone on since the last time I posted… here… 

December… hmm… 

Soooo. IAP! MIT has something like Middlebury's J term over January, a wonderful time when students get to release all of their stress and do awesome things. (Or become more stressed and do awesome things.) Popular items include: the Python (programming language named after Monty) introductory class, the RTS AI programming competition, the Lego robotics competition, exploring Boston, the glass blowing class, finding out how expensive food is, Bad Ideas, and Mystery Hunt! Too many things to try and so little time.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get into the really popular classes, but I did take two that I thoroughly enjoyed: Classical Mechanics II (physics) and Ice Hockey. My physics class covered Lagrangian and just a bit of Hamiltonian mechanics (compared to Newtonian mechanics), which form the basis of most modern physics. With one idea called the Principle of Least Action and some hand-wavy math (because physics) , you can derive all of the concepts in Newtonian mechanics. How cool is that? With some math and a few good insights, you can show where Newton's three laws come from, show that momentum and energy are conserved, and that was just the first three days. From there, we moved on to looking at orbits of planets, Rutherford's gold foil experiment, and just a touch of quantum mechanics. For my final project, I analyzed the motion of a top using what we learned in class, and I discovered something pretty neat. You know how a top starts to lean and rotate around the vertical axis when it slows down? The direction depends on the weight distribution of the top (comparing the angular momentum along the axis and across the axis). This was exactly the kind of class I wanted to take when I got here, and I'm extremely happy that I did. 

Ice hockey was probably the harder of my two IAP classes. I'm pretty sure I fell over more times in each class than I have my entire life. We went straight into games in the third class, and I was so uncoordinated every time the puck came my way. But it was so much fun. I think about 2/3 of the class had played before, so I learned a lot just trying to keep up with them. My basic skating improved a lot, although I still have trouble with pivoting while moving quickly and hockey stops. I have so much trouble with hockey stops. Which brings me to the beginning of this post: I was trying to practice my hockey stops last week in free skate, and I fell so hard on my face. My glasses flew off, and it hurt to chew for a day or two, but I was lucky. One of my friends fell the same way last Saturday, and he fractured his jaw and cheek bone. He's okay now, but he might be stuck with having to eat soft food for a little while. (He says on the plus side, it's a good excuse to eat lots of ice cream.)

This semester seems like it'll be pretty good. We started with a pretty nice blizzard (too much fun in the snow):

and I like my classes so far. 8.022, Electricity and Magnetism (for masochists) is by far the most interesting class, but it's so hard. I think you're supposed to come into the class knowing at least AP-level E&M, although it's not explicitly stated anywhere. (When people hear that I know nothing about E&M and I'm taking the class, the common response is that I'm absolutely crazy.) This is the first class I've really struggled with, and it takes so long for the concepts to sink when we move through the material at the pace we do, but the rewarding feeling of solving these hard problems is so addicting. The catch is that grades in this class are not curved, so I'm probably not going to get a good grade. I've debated with myself as to whether I should drop to the easier version of the class, but I figure that the experience of taking this class is worth so much more than getting a few points more on my GPA.

3.091, Intro to Solid State Chemistry is pretty entertaining mainly because our professor is like Mr. Coe teaching a chemistry class. He loves puns and jokes with the students, and when he talks he has random bouts of excitement and the most varied facial expressions. This class is also nice because we don't have homework, but weekly quizzes. Since the beginning of the class, we've built up an atom from the quantum level, and we've started talking about bonding. So far, so familiar, except we've been adding a lot of physics to the explanations. It definitely creates a much more in-depth picture of what goes on at the atomic scale.

18.03, Differential Equations. Eh.

21M.301, Harmony and Counterpoint I. This one's a lot of fun. I've always wanted to have a solid understanding of music theory, and I've learned a lot so far. It's really confusing now since we just started talking about the rules for writing four-voice harmonies. There's so many things you're not allowed to do! The class also has a singing lab, where we've just been singing some choir music, and a piano lab, where I have to transpose sets of chord progressions to every imaginable key. Challenging, but pretty fun.

Speaking of music, Boston is an awesome place for it. As students, we can get something called the BSO College Card, which lets us get any remaining tickets to all Boston Symphony concerts in the season for $5. The seats aren't very good, but I can't complain with such an amazing deal. A few weeks ago, I went to a concert featuring Renaud Capucon, a world-class violinist, playing the Sibelius Violin Concerto and the BSO playing Beethoven's 5th. This week, Lang Lang is coming to Boston, so if I'm lucky, I'll get to hear him play Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No. 2. 

It feels good to post after a while, and I think there was something else I wanted to write about, but I have class at 9:30 :( and I'm very tired. I was so productive today! I ran to Target and picked up a new set of sheets, so I don't have to use sheets with a 5 foot long hole in the middle. I'm looking forward to sleeping tonight.

Raku