Thursday, December 08, 2005

Exeter, snow, hats, it's all good
I had a good talk at Exeter. The math club kids were very blank-faced and uncommunicative at the beginning, but they got more into it as it went along, and asked a bunch of great questions at the end, as did the teachers.

I stayed with Mr. Wolfson, who has these big windows in his house facing the woods, and when I woke up, there was this wonderful puffy snow falling out the windows against the dark trees. So, that was really nice. I had to study a lot on the weekend, but I was studying in my favorite place to study, so that was fine. When I was in the library, a kid came up to me and asked if he could ask me a math question. He asked what math class I was in. "I'm not taking any math" didn't seem like a very good answer, so I said "I graduated in 2003," which really doesn't answer the question at all, but you know, I answered his math question, so that's good.

If you have a solid sphere of radius c, and you take a drill bit of radius a and drill out a cylinder through the center (with spherical caps on the end), the amount of hollowed-out-sphere stuff you are left with has the same volume as a sphere of radius b, where a2+b2=c2. If anyone can give a geometric explanation for why this makes sense, I'd like to know about it.

Our policy exam was on Monday for three hours. My arm hurt afterwards. And there were some things I forgot to write, but there were a lot of things I remembered to write, too.

Dan came. So we met Dan. And we liked him.

Our English and science papers were also due. That was all right. We didn't get much sleep, though. And my science paper is 1.1 MB; Hilary's is 27 pages long (because of the figures), and Ashley's is 36 pages long. So, we wrote a lot, and killed a lot of trees (because we had to print out three copies).

In better news, we got our Team Zissou Standard Issue hats, and we wore them to history class this morning. I did not know what Zissou hats were when Hallie said she was ordering them for all of us, and I looked on Google and saw people wearing red hats, but I didn't really know what the deal was. Then Hilary and I watched the movie (Life Aquatic) yesterday after we turned in our science papers, and now I know what the deal is. They just wear red hats with their blue pajamas, and that's just the way it is. So now Williams-Mystic wears them, too.

Here is a picture of us walking to history class wearing hats. You can see all of them on Shutterfly here. You will notice two members of Albion house at the extreme left of the picture.
Comments:
Who's Dan?
Mommy :-)
 
Dan is Valerie's pal. "This is my pal Dan," says Valerie. Other people might say that he is her "boyfriend."

Valerie and her mom are the only people who comment, and they know who Dan is. But now everyone knows.
 
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