This World and Me

On the first day of my freshman orientation for undergrad, my orientation leader gave us icebreaker questions to answer. One of them was "what is your favorite animal?". I thought for a second. Since elementary school, I had a particular fondness for grizzly bears because there's something incredibly charming about the intersection of fluffiness and clumsiness. It would also be a particularly relevant choice, since my university's sports team is called the California Golden Bears. However, as I thought about how to respond to this question, I realized that one animal has since overtaken the grizzly bear as my favorite animal. It was one that I had read about, wrote about, and actively admired. After all, the creature is the  fastest animal on the Earth , and its continued existence today is among the greatest triumphs in the history of environmental protection. Confident in my decision, I smiled and scribbled down my answer and returned it to my orientation leader. ...

From sixth grade through my freshman year of high school, I played the alto saxophone. My school district required its students to participate in some form of performing art during this time. Some students chose choir, some chose orchestra, I chose band. For me, it was a toss-up between the alto sax and going to orchestra and playing the cello (I love the sound of the cello, and it was also my middle school orchestra director's instrument – he claimed the cello's range best represents the vocal pitch range of the human voice). The primary reason I chose band was because my dad had claimed the sax was a "cool" instrument. I trusted his judgment. I liked playing the sax. There were a few pieces our middle school concert band played that had saxophone solos, and I had the honor of playing one or two of them. I'll actually never forget the moment when I was finished with the concert, and the string orchestra director, who was also my cross country coach, came up to ...

In this post, I will provide an illustration for why humans are said to have fundamental rights, especially in a democratic society. I came up with this thought experiment when I was at fencing practice one day in my junior year of high school. At the time, I had been taking AP US Government and Politics. In order to understand the illustration, I have to explain a little bit of how fencing works. In fencing, there are three different weapons you can choose to fence: foil, epee, and saber. Although many fencing rules are shared among all three weapons, each weapon has specific rules that differentiate it from other weapons. At the time, my fencing club primarily consisted of foil and saber; our epee program was still quite young and did not have as many fencers at the time. In fencing, the field of play is called a "strip" (or a "piste"), since it is long compared to its width (14 meters by about 2 meters). Our club at the time had eight strips, and our foil and s...

A few years ago, I stumbled across  Sonic Colors , a 2010 video game produced by Sega for the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS. The game features Sega's mascot Sonic the Hedgehog and his best friend Tails on an adventure in outer space against their nemesis Doctor Eggman, who has captured and enslaved the planets of an alien life form called Wisps. The Wisps have an energy inside them which Eggman uses to power a mind control weapon, with which he plans to take over the world. Sonic and Tails team up with the Wisps to defeat Doctor Eggman and restore freedom to the planets of the Wisps. It has been called one of the best Sonic  games. This post is not going to be about Sonic (though I could write a whole post about Sonic – in middle school I secretly watched all 74 episodes of the  Sonic X  anime ). I mentioned  Sonic Colors  because it introduced me to a band called Cash Cash, whose lead vocalist, Jean Paul Makhlouf, performed in the opening and closing t...

Imagine the following scenario. As a child, you are abducted by a highly intelligent alien life form that is interested in learning more about humans on Earth. The aliens poke and prod you and ask you questions in a language that is completely foreign to you. After some time, some level of communication will be possible – you might start by pointing at things and saying out loud what they are. They're an intelligent life form, so eventually they will understand. The aliens eventually decide to keep you and observe how human children mature. Perhaps after many years, you might find yourself accustomed to the way of alien life, but you can't shake the feeling that you simply don't belong in the alien community. To them, you are the alien. Other aliens agree with you. Perhaps an alien activist will campaign the alien government for your return to Earth: after all, abducting you from Earth without your consent was a violation of your fundamental rights! The alien courts agree a...

Earlier this year, I published a post called "Shakespearean comedy and Rio" in which I talked about the various tropes of Shakespearean comedy and how they can be identified in Blue Sky Studio's modern computer-animated film series Rio . That post was a massive effort. It took more than a year of on-and-off writing to finish. The post was informed by my study of Shakespeare at The Ohio State University in the fall of 2016 and later my study of Shakespeare at the University of California, Berkeley, in the fall of 2017. In my original draft of the post, I started writing along a tangent about Shakespearean tragedies. I wanted to compare some of the tropes of Shakespearean comedies I was learning to the tropes of Shakespearean tragedies I was learning at the same time, but I found that it was too off-topic and would have made the post too massive (the final result was already quite massive, especially with the analysis of Rio !), so I ended up cutting the discussion of Sh...

eetmn emt ybc lueba illhx When I was in elementary school, my friends and I came up with a "secret language" which we used to send messages to each other without others (e.g. teachers, classmates) knowing what the message said. It was not really a new language more than it was a variation of Pig Latin. What we did was we would write the message in English, then take the first letter of each word, shift it to the end, and then add an arbitrary letter to the end of the resulting word. For example, to translate the word "hill" into our secret language, take the first letter 'h' and move it to the end so that the word becomes "illh". Then, add any letter you want to the end of that. The intent of the last letter was to throw people off, leading them on into thinking the last letter was meaningful, when it really was just arbitrary, and it also meant that the same English word can be represented in at least 26 ways. To translate back into English, you...

Here's a mind-blowing logic puzzle that my math professor shared last week. Problem A long time ago, there lived a tribe of 100 green-eyed dragons. These dragons had a rule: if any dragon in the tribe deduces what the color of his eyes was, then that dragon must commit ritual suicide by the end of that day. Aside from this, the dragons lived peacefully. Although each dragon could see the eye color of every other dragon, no dragon was cruel enough to discuss eye colors with other dragons. For all each dragon knew, he or she could be the one dragon that had blue eyes among 99 green-eyed dragons. One day, however, a visitor arrives to the tribe. On the day she arrives – we will call this day 1 – she remarks, "I see a dragon with green eyes." The visitor leaves later that day. At the end of day 1, no dragon in the tribe performs the ritual. At the end of the next day (day 2), no one performs the ritual. In fact, after the visitor leaves, the dragons continue to live in p...