This World and Me

A few months ago, I published a post called Great Big House in New Orleans , in which I discuss a game I used to play in my elementary school music class. In that post, I explained how I designed an efficient algorithm that allowed me to quickly find the winning position of the game given how many people are playing. I published the actual algorithm itself in a second post . Basically, in the game, all students in the class sat in a circle and passed a stuffed pumpkin around while singing a song. The rules of the game were such that every eighth student gets out (i.e. exits the circle), and the last student to remain in the circle wins. Essentially, I discovered that if you have add one person to the group of people playing the game, the winning position shifts to the right by eight. For example, in an elementary school class of 21 students sitting in a circle, the student sitting at position 10 will win. If I add one student to the class, the winning position increases by eight. ...

In the summer of 2017, my family did a tour of the U.S. national parks. We had traveled out west first to Salt Lake City, where we rented out a small storage closet and placed our fencing bags there (more on that soon), then traveled south to visit Bryce Canyon National Park, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, Arches National Park, and the Horseshoe Bend. These were absolutely stunning sights, to say the least. Words don't do them justice, and while it's possible for you to search up on Google an image of each location, in my view nothing beats actually going there and experiencing it for yourself. I think by looking at a picture of it, you create an expectation for how it will look when you go, and it may actually result in the views being less spectacular if the image was digitally touched up to make it look better. When it comes to national parks, it's best to go in cold. The natural formations are absolutely breathtaking. After spending a week touring the parks south ...

The term "comedy" has a variety of meanings. In everyday use, it is a form of entertainment filled with jokes, satire, and storytelling, intended by the author to be funny – to make the audience laugh. In elementary school classes, if a student is the "class comedian", he is always goofing around, trying to get others to laugh at him. There are different kinds of comedy: stand-up comedy, situational comedy (often abbreviated to "sitcom"), surreal comedy, romantic comedy, tragicomedy. In this post I would like to discuss the genre "comedy" in the context of the works of William Shakespeare and identify one modern film franchise which contain themes that resemble those of Shakespearean comedy. * * * First, a little background. William Shakespeare is one of the most influential writers in the history of the English language. His birthdate is not documented, but we know he was baptized on April 26, 1564, and died on April 23, 1616. (2016 contain...

goodbye  · ɡo͝odˈbī ·  (1) exclam.  (also goodby or good-by ) used to express good wishes when parting or at the end of a conversation. (2) noun (plural goodbyes or goodbys ) an instance of saying “goodbye”; a parting. — The New Oxford American Dictionary On a warm July morning in Nuremberg, Germany, I was standing at an airport with my host family, waiting to meet the other American students who had been selected to travel to Germany for three weeks . It was the last day of the trip. One by one, the friends I had made in Germany trickled in with their host families. We smiled and excitedly chattered as we recalled the previous night, when we had thrown a huge party with just us kids. We assembled ourselves – Americans and our German host siblings – and took a massive group photograph. I assembled with my own host family and took a smaller photograph of just us together. Just a moment later, we had to say goodbye. I shook my host father's hand, hugged my...

Song of the Week #8 is "If My Heart Was a House" by Owl City . This week, I'm excited to be talking about another song from my favorite musician. Seven weeks ago, the very first song of the week was "Cave In" from Owl City's spectacular  Ocean Eyes  album. "If My Heart Was a House" is a somewhat more obscure song – it's track number 6 on disc 2 of the deluxe version of Ocean Eyes  – but that doesn't make it any less powerful. In a music ranking survey conducted on the forum /r/OWLCITY on the website Reddit in 2016, "If My Heart Was a House" was voted the song that forum subscribers would choose to listen to over any other song created by Adam Young, the man behind Owl City. "If My Heart Was a House" is a song about love. If that part is not immediately apparent from the title, it becomes apparent within the first few seconds of the song. You're the sky that I fell through, And I remember the view, Whenever ...

Song of the Week #7 is "The Jedi Steps and Finale" by John Williams . I'm excited to finally share some film soundtrack music as my song of the week! John Williams is, of course, the front runner of film soundtrack music. His scores have ingrained themselves deeply into popular culture across the world. From Star Wars  to Harry Potter  to Jaws  to  Jurassic Park  – chances are high that even if you haven't seen these films, you've heard their main themes before, especially Star Wars' " The Imperial March ". A significant part of why I am a  Star Wars  fan is the music. The music of  Star Wars  has a special kind of magic that extends beyond the films that it accompanies. No other film franchise on Earth truly parallels  Star Wars  in terms of renown, influence, and emotional character. There are a plethora of themes and leitmotifs sprinkled throughout the scores that make listening to them and identifying them like explorin...

Song of the Week #6 is "Halley Came to Jackson" by Mary Chapin Carpenter . This semester I am taking Introduction to General Astronomy (ASTRO C10 / L&S C70U) as a general education course at the University of California, Berkeley. Before each lecture, my professor, Alex Filippenko, usually plays a song that is related to the content we will cover in that lecture. For example, before a lecture that discussed time (among other things), he played  "Time" by Pink Floyd , and before a lecture that discussed the planet Jupiter, he played  "Jupiter, The Bringer of Jollity", the fourth movement of Gustav Holst's  The Planets . Before a lecture that discussed comets, my professor played for us "Halley Came to Jackson". The title of the song refers to Halley's Comet , a famous comet that appears in the night sky approximately every 76 years. "Jackson" probably refers to Jackson, Mississippi , the capital of the state of Mississip...

On Monday, I wrote a post about how I wrote a program in Java and later Python that could solve an old game I used to play in my elementary school music class called Great Big House in New Orleans. It was a lengthy post, and you can read the entire thing here . Basically, in the game, all students in the class sat in a circle and passed a stuffed pumpkin around while singing a song. The rules of the game were such that every eighth student gets out (i.e. exits the circle), and the last student to remain in the circle wins. The program that I initially wrote in Java used arrays to simulate an actual game of Great Big House in New Orleans. However, using data of winning positions based on class sizes up to 1000, I was able to identify a pattern in consecutive winning positions that I could use to simplify my program so that it could solve for the winning position without having to simulate a single game with arrays or lists. The code is structured as follows. You are given (by the ...

Note: This post has many errors and omissions. See this 2024 post for an update. When I was a student at Scottish Corners Elementary School, we occasionally played a game in our weekly music class with Miss Bowman called Great Big House in New Orleans. In this game, all of the students in the class sat in a circle. One student – the student at position 1 – held a small stuffed pumpkin. While singing the following song, we passed the pumpkin around the circle. Great big house in New Orleans, Forty stories high, Every room that I've been in, Filled with pumpkin pie. The purpose of this exercise was to teach elementary school students about rhythm. As a rule, the pumpkin has to be passed to the next student on every beat of the song. A student can't ignore the rhythm of the song and pass the ball offbeat (i.e. too quickly or too slowly). The pumpkin has to be passed on the beat. Whoever has the pumpkin when the song reaches the word high  and the word pie  is out of the ...