Whatever Joey does blog

[jvang]

Xyzzy wants me to post on this blog once a day so... here I am!

I'm a 17-year-old high school student at ASMSA, a residential high school. Not really much goes on here, so I don't have a lot of things to post about. Feel free to ask me about whatever goes on or something

[Nick]

Welcome back! We haven't seen you here since 2016 and back then you were still a kid!

ASMSA looks impressive from their website - serious courses like Number Theory, Artificial Intellingence and Robotics, Astronomy,...
Or are you more interested in the Arts side?
What's the best thing there right now?

[jvang]

I'm more into the maths and sciences. They do have some neat courses that aren't listed, such as a semi-serious one on time travel.

Everything is pretty equally good, so I'd say the best thing is the living area and residential life. The rooms are nice, it's not but a 5-minute walk to classes, and the food is pretty good given that they use basic cafeteria foods. Some days it feels like I'm eating at a restaurant

[Uncwilly]

Tell our glorious leader that you have started to show an interest in "gender based anatomy independent studies".

[LaurV]

I think we have two jvang guys here... one has only gun, one has gun and katana...

Anyhow, welcome back.
Did you solve the dilemma of the 10k little UFOs?

[jvang]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

Tell our glorious leader that you have started to show an interest in "gender based anatomy independent studies".

Heh, googling that actually brings up 1.5 million results. Now for credibility...

Originally Posted by LaurV

Did you solve the dilemma of the 10k little UFOs?

That was actually just a case of steganography that I didn't know existed back then. The entirety of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was encoded in the picture, hence its large size.

[LaurV]

(and no, I didn't know, I took it like a literal puzzle)

High school time is the most wonderful time in your life, enjoy it, and do not waste it...
When I was your age, someone told me that, and I didn't believe it.
But you will see later what we, older people, mean by that...

[Nick]

Originally Posted by jvang

Everything is pretty equally good, so I'd say the best thing is the living area and residential life.

It sounds like you have a good system there, with different people managing the residential side and the high school side.
Having the same people in authority over you 24 hours a day would be difficult, however good they are!

Originally Posted by jvang

I'm more into the maths and sciences. They do have some neat courses that aren't listed, such as a semi-serious one on time travel.

Wow! How deeply you can get into ideas like relativity and time travel depends heavily on how much math you have done.
(At our Dutch universities, General Relativity is a course for students who already have a math or physics bachelor's degree!)

Here on earth, we can think about a point in space and consider the same point a few moments later. But it isn't the same point any more - the earth has twisted on its axis, the whole earth has moved around the sun a bit further, the sun has moved within the galaxy, and so on. What's more, relativity teaches us that you can't tell the difference between staying still and moving at a constant speed in a constant direction (anything you do will have the same effect in both situations). So it doesn't actually make sense to talk about "the same point in space" at two different times at all!

[xilman]

Originally Posted by Nick

Wow! How deeply you can get into ideas like relativity and time travel depends heavily on how much math you have done.
(At our Dutch universities, General Relativity is a course for students who already have a math or physics bachelor's degree!)

Partially true but not the whole story, IMAO. If you want to do original research you undoubtedly need a mathematics or physics degree and postgraduate courses.

OTH I can, and have, explained GR to 10 year old kids and give them an understanding which is markedly better than many physics graduates have achieved. Needless to say, SR is just as easy to explain.

Relativity, special and general, really isn't that difficult a subject. What is difficult is overcoming the education imposed by schools which have barely escaped the seventeenth century. That is, the mechanics established by Galileo and Newton.

[kladner]

Originally Posted by LaurV

I think we have two jvang guys here... one has only gun, one has gun and katana...

Anyhow, welcome back.
Did you solve the dilemma of the 10k little UFOs?

The avatars have synchronized.
Eek! Strike that! No! Wait! Now sync'd again. Note different heads, as well as weapons. I think we have a case of independently cycling avatars. Perhaps the gerbils are feeling frisky.
EDIT: Like the forum title, they change with every screen refresh.

[jvang]

Originally Posted by Nick

Wow! How deeply you can get into ideas like relativity and time travel depends heavily on how much math you have done.

It's a lot less rigorous than you might think, given that it's taught by a history teacher and an English teacher who IIRC might be a chemist or geologist but I'm not really sure...

I'll be leaving for Italy as part of a trip sponsored by EF Tours for our school. We'll be traveling to a few places, passing mainly through Florence and Rome with a detour to Assisi. Lots of cool things we'll be seeing, and if I remember I'll take pictures of all the cool things. I'll try and keep updating this thread while on the trip but hotels, if they have WiFi in the first place, will be high traffic areas for Internet usage and as such I may not be able to.