UCLA, APs and some Programming

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!