High Horses

“We can run the bases, y’all should just stick to titrating them.” — J.T.

High Horses

In my school, the top 4% GPA seniors are invited to a high honors dinner at the end of the year. Each student can invite a teacher to speak about themselves at the end, and then the student can also make a speech to the group.

The Shamburglar

A history teacher made one of the funniest jokes of the night, first saying that a girl student would do great at college, since it’s a place to start fresh, and that there definitely wouldn’t be any high school trauma to haunt her. Unless… her ex was going to the same school.

With that, the crowd was half-laughing, half-shocked at the teacher’s comments, but it was all in the spirit of joking around, so I think that she will recover from that mildly embarrassing moment.

Mr. J

I invited Mr. J to speak on my behalf, and he mentioned how he one time passed my physics class in the hallway and peeked in to notice that I was paying close attention, but probably just to make sure that the teacher didn’t do anything wrong, which was pretty funny. He overemphasized my teaching prowess, but that set up my speech very well.

In the middle of my speech, I mentioned that I saw a few of my students in the crowd, and that to them, I would just like to say, “You’re welcome.” It was a great moment.

Potential Problems

One of the teachers I was going to invite, DMO, actually opposes the idea of the banquet but didn’t elaborate on exactly why. However, knowing him so well, I think it’s only right that I attempt to understand a potential reason.

The GPA-based invitation is a product of a schooling system which has used the precarious and hollow means of GPAs in order to achieve the just goal of educating students.

While the obsession with GPA does not necessarily cause true learning to occur, the opposite is generally always true. Getting this order wrong risks worse results in the long term. Students may never learn critical thought, curiosity, or perseverance if they are merely obsessed with getting a higher grade as opposed to learning deeper fundamental concepts.

In fact, in the dinner itself, it was evident that many of the students present were not what an objective observer would consider the most curious or hardworking students. Actually, some could even be considered cheats, frauds, and manipulators. So, just because this group of students has the top 4% GPA, doesn’t mean all of them are good people.

If anyone reading this is aiming for top of the class, be warned: you will be disappointed with what you find past the pond’s veneer—sunlight and scum.

Fight Club

There was a fight the other day in the girls’s bathroom and the video has circulated across the school at $|\overrightarrow{v}|=c$. The two scufflers have been allegedly involved in similar situations before (pregnancy and missing person report, separate occasions).

However, I don’t know why there was more than one person recording (at least five). One of them definitely could have stepped in to stop the fight. Although, I guess it is natural to not want to get involved in the fight. In fact, I try to stay as far away as possible from the girls’s bathroom on the second floor.

Furthermore, someone who is not experienced enough in stopping fights could just make the situation worse by getting hurt, so the onlookers should have immediately gone to get the security guard who is almost always parked outside on the second floor. It would take about five seconds to do that without running.

However, a bystander appeared to join in order to end the conflict by pulling one off the other, but another girl joined in and started fighting the third girl (she probably thought she was trying to help the one getting beat up by her friend), leading to a classic 2v2 battle (much like the hit game, Rumbleverse). It’s so funny because if the (probably neutral) girl first verbalized that she wanted to just stop the fighting, it probably would have ended without the battle royale.

Eventually, it ended abruptly when another girl walked in and stopped them.

PokeMMO

PokeMMO is one of the best games available right now, and I highly recommend it for people who aren’t interested in traditional action games because it is actually quite relaxing to play casually.

Essentially, it is an massive online multiplayer game (people from around the world) with Pokemon generations 1-5 included in the game. There are some slight adaptations to make a more uniform game. All the adjustments to features such as learned movesets can be found on the wiki. Furthermore, the battle AI is much smarter, having an understanding of typings and switching.

There are also HATS! That’s right, they only cost Pokedollars, which means that if you start as a bald character, you can eventually buy the black Heisenberg hat and become Walter White.

After four gym badges, it is possible to play on the same character in a different region (all existing items and Pokemon stay in the original region).

Tip: to trade with your friend, you must be in the same channel (found in the “Community” menu found at the bottom of the screen)

Research

My internship has hit quite a roadblock, which is that the interaction data in its current form doesn’t correlate well to interactivity. However, I learned that a true scientist never gives up at the first sign of failure. That is what distinguishes a scientist from an ordinary person. My professor calmly suggested that we do some checks to figure out where the problem is.

After making the difference between interacting and non-interacting more obvious by not using mismatches, and using random images instead, the CNN achieved 100% accuracy.

So, now I am seeing if I can figure out how another paper has achieved a similar goal using autoencoders and whether I can do something similar. Hopefully, I can.