It is that wonderful time of year for AP students at high schools everywhere. A time you have spent the school year preparing for, where two to three hours of testing will determine whether or not you learned the material. Never mind the enormous gap between stuff you learned early on and stuff you learned last week, it is up to you to shape up or ship out. To students like me right now, Advanced Placement is quickly becoming another way to say "provoking a state of restlessness and agitation" [anxiety]. This year I have the pleasure of taking only three AP's, two of which are on the same day. Physics C: Mechanics and Biology, two heavy hitters, and the wonderfully confusing English Literature test (logic-free!). I am not so uncertain about Biology: I took the practice AP last week and have been studying the lectures, study guides and chapter summaries religiously. Physics, however, makes me uneasy. An issue, no doubt, that can be solved with a quick gloss over all the chapters, a detailed read of whatever tests have survived my backpack and frantic worrying over forgetting the little annoyances of simple harmonic motion, which are simple until you have to answer test questions. And finally, English Literature looms with an evil stench. Now don't get me wrong, I am not saying I hate the English language, I merely dislike the logic-free nature of literature analysis.
Now, on to the good news. I have accepted my offer of admission to UCLA. After crawling their site and filling out forms, I now even have an UCLA email address. I find I cannot wait for school to end, summer to pass, until I find myself going to classes at UCLA. Biology and Physics seem more fascinating then ever. I can only imagine the combination of the two. Well, no. Scratch that. I have seen some work already in Biophysics, most recently in a talk at Stanford on the neural networks of the animal brain. Gods, it was glorious, considering the fact that the ambient noise in the neural network keeps it from resonating, a primitive form of an epileptic seizure.
In hobby land, I have finished a little screen-scraping program that allows clubs from DeviantArt to fetch a complete list of all who watch them and formats the output into :devname: notation. It is at http://zbenjamin.telemuse.net/myFriends. Try it out!
Congratulations to Professor Andy Fraknoi of Foothill college for winning "California Professor Of the Year". We've enjoyed his Foothill astronomy lectures and series for many years, hope to see more!
Better than Google Sky, the Minolta Planetarium gets the new Infinium S projector. With new features, better details, and a faster rendering engine, the Infinium S and the control mechanisms are ready for sky exploration in the twenty-first century. Given a private opportunity to "test drive" the equipment, both my sister Rebecca (see New De Anza Planetarium - Bring your binoculars) and I couldn't wait - and we weren't disappointed.
The Minolta Planetarium, located at De Anza college, was a favorite of our family for 30 years, and has finally reopened after three long years undergoing renovation. In 2004, the MS-15 used was becoming antiquated and less useful. The challenge of maintaining it was rapidly growing, much to the chagrin of De Anza. After contacting Minolta, De Anza decided to renovate the planetarium and replace the projector. The new guy is the Infinium S, and it offers many new features. The most striking lies in the rendering of the Milky Way. Instead of a static image, the Infinium draws every little dot with varying intensity to simulate the three dimensions of the sky.
I attended BarCampBlock this week. BarCampBlock is the anniversary of the first BarCamp, originally held at SocialText, and for BarCampBlock, it was held not only at SocialText, but spread out among several other buildings (IDEO, Edgeio, ...).
I arrived after the end of most tracks on the first day. I talked with many developers and technologists after the last track ended. One man wrote a flash application that would allow people to "leave" their voice mark on their friends social network page. Another, from Restaurant Breeze, revealed CrazyMenu, a web-2.0 interface for collaborating on dining and places to eat.
I stayed overnight, an unexpected occurrence to the SocialText people, and prepared for the next day. On Sunday, I attended the Video Compression talk, from DigitalMove, a CDN, and learned about some of the pitfalls of certain codecs. The proprietary codec DigitalMove uses for Quicktime appears to be useful, but for our company, CoolClip, it is not useful as we focus on Flash videos, not the Quicktime media player.
E-Governance was a discussion on integrating modern web-2.x technology with government. I was, and still am, that the basic idea would function, as I feel that governments, being slow moving behemoths, would loathe to lose their beloved paper and grounded processes. The idea was to merge the power of the wiki, blogs, and podcasts with polls, voting, and departments. One thing I found most unbecoming about the E-Governance idea is that it only considers the majority and raw numbers, ignoring the minority and holding the potential to misrepresent others. I am also skeptical that technologists would ever be accepted in the American government due to the oft-remarked upon streak of anti-intellectualism in the US.
There are integral times of growth vital to young men and women hoping to join the ranks of the worlds scientists. Although growth is never guaranteed, many of us still try for it. Some are even lucky enough to be selected, out of many applicants or groups, to valuable internships, like the one at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics in UC Santa Cruz. The privilege of working on college level experiments before attending college expands the experience of many interns lucky enough to get the internship. Even if people split off into semi-isolated groups, a complaint I heard this year, it is interesting to note that everyone must work together to make both of the highlight experiments, ADOM and Muon Lifetime, work.
Ben Jolitz is a Los Gatos High School student interested in science, media, open source and art. He likes to compete in science fair events and most recently won first place medals in botany and the Intel Promising Young Scientist award with a full scholarship to the University of California's Science and Math summer school (COSMOS) to study oceanography. Currently, he is researching the effects of global warming on cordgrass species of the San Francisco Bay, in preparation for Synopsys 2007. He participates in star parties with the SJAA and is rebuilding his telescope again. He's very much into art and digital media, along with animation and computers.
