The nerdiness of this post is slightly overwhelming

So I'm at a program at WPI (Worcester Polytechnic Institute - college in Massachusetts) and it's pretty freaking awesome.  Just thought you should know.

So here's how this goes down: 200 nerds from across the globe gathered together to be awesome and learn things.  I'm in physics, so we're learning about astronomy and black holes and quantum mechanics and special relativity and all that mind-blowing theoretical craziness.  I'm also in creative writing, since we're required to take one main STEM class (physics) and also one Humanities and Arts class, for this camp that I'm at.

Basically, it's amazing.  We've played countless games of Magic the Gathering and Settlers of Catan and Egyptian Rat-Screw.  We've held many Rubik's Cube competitions.  We've broken out into Disney medleys on the bus.  We've had light saber duels on the quad (nerf guns are, quite unfortuantely, forbidden at WPI).  We've played Ninja, quite a bit.  We've had multi-hour-long debates about quantum physics and how one would survive the eventual collapse of the universe (including detailed plans on how to become a cyborg-human and create an alternate universe within a quantum computer).  We've eaten ice cream cake at 8AM. 

The best part is, we're all crazy nerds here.  Not only do they understand my nerdy t-shirts, we can have awesome debates about Legend of Korra or Death Note or Nerdfighteria.  We all understand the internet jokes that everyone makes.

The funny thing is, every morning, the Program Assistants slip an announcement sheet under your dorm door, listing out the day's schedule and announcements.  And on the back, they put a comic.  For the past three days, its been an xkcd comic, and about 80% of the camp was talking about how they'd seen that comic before.  It's great.

Anyways, just letting you know that I'm not dead, and that I'm actually being awesome, just not online.  I have real-life nerd friends too!  Be proud of me.

Ding-Dong Ditching with a twist

So I was inspired by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and John Green's videos on Positive pranking, and decided to trty it out myself.  My sister and I went to Stop & Shop and bought a box of Hostess Ding-Dongs.  Then, we attached notes to them, and "ding-dong ditched" some random strangers.  That is, we put attached an explanatory note to the Ding-Dong, left it on their porch, rang the doorbell, and bolted.

That's a Ding-Dong with a note on it.

Overall, the whole thing made me really happy.  I got to go around watching people discover food left on their front porch.  I really hope they enjoyed the gift.  It makes me feel good to think I might have made someone's day better.  I mean, my day would certainly be better if I discovered someone had left a Ding-Dong on my porch.

The only annoyance was when people weren't home and didn't answer the door.  We couldn't exactly leave chocolate covered food on their porch when it was a sunny day, so we had to go collect it and move on.  We started only targeting houses that had garage door open, because it meant they were almost definitely home.

I strongly suggest trying a "Positive Prank" yourself.

Friday 56: It's actually on a Friday this time! Be proud of me

Rules:
1) Grab any book
2) Turn to page 56
3) Find an interesting sentence
4) Post it
5) Add your post URL to Freda's Voice

"Girls think they're only allowed to wear dresses on formal occasions, but I like a woman who says, you know, I'm going over to see a boy who is having a nervous breakdown, a boy whose connection to the sense of sight itself is tenuous, and gosh dang it, I am going to wear a dress for him."

-- The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

I'm REALLY bad at days of the week

This week has been a mess.  I thought it was Friday this morning, probably because I forgot to turn off my alarm.  So, bright and early at 5:55 AM on a Saturday morning, I wake to that lovely noise.

It was a fantastic start to the weekend.  Not.

The point of that was to say, I'm sorry.  But it's okay to post this on Saturday, because my head is screwy anyways.  I liked the idea of it.

So here, you go.  This is the Friday 56 (on a Saturday)!

Hosted by Freda's Voice

Rules:

- Grab a book, any book

- Turn to page 56

- Find any sentence that's interesting

- Post it

- Add link of Freda's site

"Another time, on the country estate of Monserrate in Santa Fe de Bogota, he woke up screaming because he dreamed that while they were having lunch together, General Santander plucked out his own eyeballs because they interfered with his eating and placed them on the table."
-- The General in His Labyrinth

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

That's certainly interesting, especially taken out of context.  I haven't finished this book yet, but it's quite good.  It's about the South American revolutionary Simon Bolivar, which is funny because I have to play him in a AP World History presentation next week.

I like this.  I try to do it every Friday.  Though in that regard, I'm not off to a great start.

Happy Alaska Young Day!

This message brought to you from 6th Period Marketing class.  Just to let you know that I am awesome.  You must admit, it's an important fact to note.

Happy Alaska Young Day!  If you don't know who that is, go straight to your local library and check out "Looking for Alaska" (in your pants) by John Green.

Do you know how I'm going to celebrate Alaska Young Day?  That's right, I'm going to meet John and Hank Green!

You have no idea how difficult it is for me to stay coherent at this moment, and not dissolve into a fit of babbling.

You see, for those non-Nerdfighters amongst you, today is not only Alaska Young Day, but the release date of John Green's new novel, "The Fault in Our Stars."  And I, flyergirl13, will be attending the first stop on John's book tour, the Tour De Nerdfighting, which is right here in Massachusetts in about 5 hours.

Yes, you are all very, very jealous.  

Whoops, class is almost over.  Have fun with your mundane evening plans!  DFTBA, yo.


UPDATE:
I'm sorry if you didn't understand that, I was slightly crazed with excitement when I wrote it.  John Green is one of my favorite authors, and I went to the book signing for the release of his new book, The Fault in Our Stars (which I already finished and is absolutely incredible.  HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.)
What I liked best about the event was, obviously, John and Hank, but also all the other people there. Imagine an auditorium of over 800 people, and you could (and we did) walk up to ANYONE (literally) and start a conversation, and become friends.  And don't get me started on the vast number of awesome, infinitely nerdy t-shirts present.
This is getting to be a long update, so I won't go into the details (you know, Hank in a tutu, TFiOS waving, all that jazz) so peace out, dudes.

Abundance of Covers

You may or may not know that John Green is holding a design contest for the cover of the newest edition of An Abundance of Katherines.

I've never really tried designing things before, so I tried it out and this is what I came up with.  I was hoping you could all tell me what I can do to make it better.

One concern I had was the background color - I wasn't sure which to choose.  Any ideas?
Also, does the little bit of letters next to his name look weird?  Should I cut them out and just put the name across the whole width of the bottom?

COPYRIGHT 2011

The weird circle is my attempt at one of those annoying watermarks, so people can't steal the cover design.  PEOPLE.  It is illegal to steal this cover!

Solver Extraordinaire: ME

I  now understand why people carry around Rubik's Cubes.  Because when you solve the, you feel so freaking epic you just want to keep doing it forever.

I learned how to solve a Rubik's Cube today.

I still need to look at this one long algorithm, but I have all the others memorized, and I just feel awesome.  I can't stop doing it, as though if I'm not sure if it was just chance and I have to do it again to prove I can.

My best time is 3:47, which compared to most people is terrible, but I'm super proud of.  Considering I've known how to do this for about 5 hours.

Imagine what you could do in 3 minutes 47 seconds.  You could brush our teeth.  Write around 125 NaNo words.  If you're Bill Gates, you earn around $5000.  You could get around 300 points in Fruit Ninja, depending how good you are.  You could do your pre-calc homework.
Or you could solve Rubik's Cube.

Well, at least I've crossed this item off my bucket list.

Snippet of my Bucket List


312. Go skydiving
313. Swim with dolphins

314. Solve a Rubik's Cube

315. Watch every Vlogbrothers video

Sorry I have no hand-drawn pictures, but here's an awesome prank related to Rubik's Cubes.

I don't know what "Leibster" means, but it sounds fancy

UPDATE:

This is the second post in a row that has been up for a day or two with no title.  I generally title posts after I write them, and now I'm forgetting to go back and title them.  If I forget again, you have permission to virtual-slap me in the comments.

It would appear as though I have been awarded an award, which is a rewarding feeling, and since this award was awarded to me by Gabi who I don't think is creepy. I think I should be awarded another award for the award-winning usage of some form of the word "award" in these few award-winning sentences.

Onto the blog award.  Basically, it means I have to tell you 7 things about me then tag 7 people with under 100 followers.  Let us commence the battle of wits!

*Though not really a battle since, considering I'm the one writing all this anyways, it's a bit biased, but hey, who said it was a fair Battle of Wits?  If it was fair, Westley would not be immune to iocane powder, and where would that leave us?  Being thrown off the Cliffs of Insanity, most likely.

1) I am more than slightly obsessed with The Princess Bride, and if you have not seen/read it, I shall strike you with an ax.

II) I just learned that "ax" is not spelled "axe" even though I always thought it was.  I guess "Axe" is just how they spell the deodorant.

c) Thee may be surprised to learneth that, upon occasion, I may enjoy to speaketh in a style which dost be similar to that of the Olde English.  Tis a most pleasant merriment.

iv) My hair has been dyed pink on and off for the last six months, but I didn't bleach my hair first so you couldn't really see it.

cinq) I can't roll my tongue or touch my nose or have a hitchhiker's thumb or anything cool like that.

6) I know over 100 digits of pi.

G) I refuse to number things in a normal fashion.

AND....drumroll...to the tagging!
Umm....

•  Ohmygoodnessgraciousgosh because I think it's funny how I started saying the blog title in normal conversation.
• Randomly Yakking, though I can't find the follower count (I'm likely blind), if I'm wrong we can just pretend you have less than 100.
• Defenestrated Feet who shares my fascination with shoes.
• Irrefutable Rules of Teenage Life because she's a Sparkler (we gotta stick together) and her URL has velociraptors in it.
• [I Am Unimaginative] because she's awesome.  DFTBA.
• Color it Awesomesauce because she appreciates the awesomeness of "awesome"
• Chronicles of Beck because she's quite funny and needs some followers, peeps.

Hope I didn't leave anyone out.  If you're reading this and being offended because I forgot to tag you, I apologize and place the blame on my press secretary, my pet rock, Westley.  Any complaints should be sent to him.

Finally, I have to leave you with this picture my friend showed me.  Maybe I'm just slow and everyone's seen it, but I cracked up.  Pretend like you think it's hilarious too so I don't feel bad.

It's "A Dell Rolling in the Deep"!!!

I'm Not Sure Whether to be Honored or Offended

Next week is Spirit Week at school.  Cast your eyes upon the theme for next Tuesday:

I mean, I'm a bit speechless.  My nerd friends and I are certainly honored by this kind of recognition?  I mean, having people dress like us for a full day?  Wow.  Then again, why do we need a special "Nerd Day?"  Every day is Nerd Day in my world!

Should I be honored that our elected student representatives are taking us nerds into account?

Or insulted that everyone will dress weird make a mockery of true nerdom?  Nerdom is not wearing large glasses, knee-high socks and collared shirts, as the sports teams seem to believe.  Umm, you're thinking of hipsters.

The only way to fully dress for Nerd Day is to come to school made of awesome. Which I doubt the majority of my school will be able to do.  Oh, well.  It shall be fun, regardless.

What happens when you put tomatoes in a blender?

You get a smoothie.  Tomatoes are a fruit, and fruit in a blender makes smoothies.

I would display lovely pictures of me attempting to make a tomato smoothie, but a) I don't like tomatoes, b) Our blender is broken, and c) Wouldn't it just be tomato sauce?

This doesn't have anything to do with anything except a way to transition into blathering excuses.  Basically, the reason I haven't posted in a while is sort of like putting tomatoes in a blender.

(Pauses a few seconds to let that sink in.)

My head is a blender.  This year I've thrown a good many more activities, classes, and general things that now my tomatoes are spewing out the top (tomatoes in this analogy is my brain.  The first to go will be my cerebral cortex.  Then the bottom will split open and spill out my cerebellum.  We're studying the brain in AP Psych).

Basically, I have no free time.

Told in a roundabout way involving tomatoes.

This is a picture of my head exploding (I'm not sure why I look so happy.)

Anyways, this is why I won't be posting as regularly as before.  I'm sorry if that makes you cry.

ANYWAYS

Updates:

I spent the weekend visiting colleges and riding roller coasters.  Guess which one I liked better?

Then I met a famous clown.

Then I went to a math meet (I did pretty well - 11 out of 18 points!).

Then I got a new John Green book.

Then I made an egg carrier.

Then I procrastinated.

And  that's all folks, unless, in the time it takes me to finish this sentence, I think of something else to say.

...Didn't happen.

Over and out.

NO, WAIT!  DON'T GO!

I remembered something whilst creating labels.

So in physics, we're doing projectile motion and that kind of thing, with degree launches, which require usage of sin, cos, and tan.  We're investigating the amazing idea that sin/cos = tan (I never knew that.  I mean, it makes total sense, but still).  So one person says, "I get the whole sin/cos thing, but what does this have to do with solving the problem?"  And my physics teacher replies, "I'm sorry, I was going off on a tangent."

We cracked up for about a full minute.

Nerd jokes <3

Wow, we are so nerdy

As a opener at the Science Olympiad Club, we got a bunch of brain teasers to warm up.  A bunch of standard ones, you know about the farmer crossing the river with the fox and rabbit and carrots and whatever, that kind of thing.  Simple stuff.  But there was one problem that threw us.

"Turn this roman numeral into 6 using only one line."

So we worked on it.  My first idea was something like this:

You will note that it is all one line.  However, it wasn't the right answer (sad face).  So we kept experimenting.  Next came:

That says "- 3" using only one line, in case you couldn't tell.  But, weirdly enough, our amazing solution was still wrong.

We decided that using roman or arabic numerals wouldn't work, so we tried other options.  First: Greek numbers.  Failure.  Then came our epiphany:  maybe we had to write it in binary!  9 in binary is 1001, so maybe if we subtracted a 3 (11 in binary) we'd get 990 in decimal form, which in roman numerals is XM, so maybe if we flipped the whole thing upside down so it looked like XI then turned the I into an M....

We went on like this for a while.  I came up with the glorious solution that 6 was 110 in binary.  So if we let "X" represent 0, then all we had to do was add another line at the beginning.  I was so proud for having figured it out.

I was wrong.

At this point, we'd worked on it for about ten minutes, trying every combination of binary and decimal and roman numerals we could find.  Nothing yielded.  The teacher hinted that the answer was painfully obvious.  And it hit me like a brick wall, disregarding the fact that brick walls are inanimate and incapable of motion, let alone hitting someone.  If I really wanted to be in contact with a brick wall, it's I who would have to do the hitting.  Just sayin'

So the answer hit me (the answer is also inanimate.  See above).  I knew it.  I danced around the room mocking those poor fools attempting to use Braille.  Just kidding.  I politely mentioned that I knew the answer.

Are you ready?  I'll give you time to shield your eyes by presenting you with this picture of Matthew Lewis/Neville Longbottom

Ok.  Are you ready now?

You'd better be.

I kind of love how we spent time converting it to binary and trying to solve that way.  I love being nerdy.  DFTBA <3