l.

I've got so much work due next week that I almost haven't got the time to complain. Almost.

Today our TOK teacher was telling us about a former student of his who believed in past lives and thought he was a pilot during WWII. I asked him what side this kid thought he fought on and he said "clearly the wrong side because he ended up wearing [our school's] uniform in his next life." I'm writing my exhibition on "the challenges raised by the dissemination and/or communication of knowledge." I wanted to tackle different aspects of this question with my three chosen objects.

I've got "river crab" as my first one. It's a Chinese internet meme poking fun at the CCP's decision to censor the Internet to produce a "Harmonious Society" (a concept that originated as a reaction to increasing inequality in Mainland China resulting from unchecked economic growth). "River crab" (héxiè) and "harmonious" (héxié) are homophones, so netizens use it as a tongue-in-cheek way of mocking censorship. This doesn't change a thing, of course, but most forms of online activism rarely do. I'm thinking about using this as my example of the restrictions censorship puts on communication.

For my second one I felt I needed to address the medium that knowledge is disseminated through, which is why I wanna write about fiber-optic cables. They're arguably the most critical infrastructure supporting long-distance connection via the modern Internet and telecommunications, and it's all done with modulated pulses of light producing strings of binary code. But they're so susceptible to environmental damage! Critical communications may be cut off w/o the ability to repair them. That's part of why I think they're so fascinating. Nations, societies etc. are so fragile. When the Roman Empire fell all of a sudden nobody came around to repair the roads anymore, and think about what happened to the infrastructure in the USSR's constituent republics after 1991! I could easily imagine something similar happening to our global information superhighway, and all the knowledge that would be lost. It'd also be interesting to analyze a map of these undersea cables and what that says about how material conditions impact where knowledge is spread and who gets to access it.

Haven't decided on the third one yet, but I know I wanna get into the limits of language itself. Claude Shannon's Prediction and Entropy of Printed English (1951) gets into quantifying the redundancy of written English. Shannon found that 50% of words in the typical sentence are redundant, easily predictable, and only exist due to the conventional rules of the language. This affects how efficiently words can be communicated as bits: the standard transmission is 1 word/bit, but Shannon predicted it could go to approx. 4 words/bit. I could also write about Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), where he famously asserted that "... the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world", which I interpret as the limit of logical possibilities that a language gives to its speaker, ergo their "world". I don't know much about formal linguistic theories, but I always found it fascinating how language naturally limits the maximum efficiency of communication, or even what can be experienced/communicated. At times I wish I could beam my consciousness directly into someone else's head and make them understand me without all the ambiguity of language, like a Vulcan mind meld.

Sometimes I'm riffing with my friends and I get struck with the need to record the conversation, and lately I've been meaning to record more mundane anecdotes from daily life. Since this blog is partially meant to serve as an archive, I thought I'd write some of it here.

Our regular teacher wasn't in for theory of knowledge (epistemology in IB-speak) today, but we were supposed to discuss whether the moral character of an author could be separated from the value of their work with a list that ranged from Ye to John von Neumann. The trouble was that almost none of the mathematicians on the list had any significant shortcomings. I mean, the only shortcoming they could think of were that Erdős used amphetamines, that Gödel suffered from paranoia in his seventies and starved himself to death, and that Galois was a political radical who got himself killed in a duel. I didn't really see any of those things as immoral, and my friend (whom I will refer to as the Maginot Line from this post onward) didn't either. I joked to him that if they really wanted to make an argument on a morally-controversial mathematician, they should've listed the Unabomber.

A good friend of mine (whom I referred to as the snowboarder in this post) was stuck writing a math competition for six hours today. Another friend graciously decided to order her a coffee so she'd have a lifeline for the last two blocks of the day. However, she apparently misclicked a few times and ordered a six-shot espresso instead of the regular three-shot one, and then the heart palpitation-inducing drink didn't even go to our friend in the end because it was given to a trivia teammate of ours who was also writing the competition. I don't even want to imagine how that tasted, or the aftereffects it produced.

Another topic of the day: optical computing & photonic logic, which is exactly what it sounds like--light as logic gates, replacing electrons with protons. Very, very cool technology being worked on right now, architecturally unique compared to other forms of quantum computing. Most of the details fly over my head.

I spent my weekend at one of those Model United Nations simulations for high schoolers, presenting hastily-written speeches and resolution papers and fighting to stay awake during our morning crisis. Between roughly 16 hours of in-session debate and partying with strangers until my legs started to ache I was entirely out of it by 4pm on Sunday. My brain felt like a freshly printed document with ink still wet on the pages, if the contents were written by a monkey on a typewriter. It went like this: session and session of raising placards and furtively writing notes and directives for failed and successful blocs alike. The first day a friend of mine (who had scored an assistant director position at the conference) started a conversation with a delegate from California, who was frantically pacing around practising his speech with a Bible in his hand (either he was in the 30 Years War committee, or just real devout). The guy from California told us the whole banging on tables and "shocked and appalled" call and response thing was exclusive to Canadian MUN. I still don't know if he was fucking with us. My friend the assistant director then up and vanished for the next day and a half for the noble mission of moderating caucuses and trying to get girls' numbers, only to reappear at the party for a game of UNO. Here's the thing: when you're hosting an event with over a thousand teenagers it's pretty much a given that about half of them are attending with the express purpose of bagging each other, no matter how "academic" it looks. It's like aiming for awards: many try, but few succeed.

On night two I went out for sushi with some fellow delegates from my committee and unwittingly sat right next to Leah Jeffries, the actress playing Annabeth in the Percy Jackson TV adaptation. Percy Jackson was my favourite book series in elementary school, but I've never seen the TV show. Luckily, the girls I was eating with recognized her and asked for a picture once she'd finished her meal. The morning after I dragged myself out of bed at 6:30 to attend the morning crisis, in which:

- A whistleblowing engineer was shot and killed by a Nerf blaster
- New Zealand got nuked twice. First by North Korea after an explicit threat that everyone assumed was a bluff. Then by the Russian Federation, who was aiming for China with a directive written so hastily that a miscalculation had their nukes jettisoning above Wellington.
- The whole damn committee got dissolved for its failures
- Our director breakdanced for us and was subsequently swarmed by anonymous notes asking for his hand in marriage

So whenever you're feeling disillusioned at the state of the world, remember things could always be worse. You could be living in a high school Model UN simulation.

Postscript: how crazy is it that container shipping only became widely adopted after WWII!? Yeah, it makes sense with the isolationist streak of the 1920s-30s but it's still weird to think about...

I haven't written anything about lifting, even though it's one the main things I've got going for myself at the moment. January this year I started using the gym at my school ~2 times a week (though I'm not always meeting that quota, I slack more often than I wanna admit.)

Gym is going pretty well for me. The gym at my school is mostly used by teenage guys (and a few girls as well, though most of the people I see regularly are guys) so there's always a lot of messing around and funny shit happening - like the time one guy brought his 3ds to the gym and played Pokemon while on the leg press. The guy running it is awesome. He's this big Cantonese guy who used to work at a casino, and he assigns pushups if one of us backtalks or pisses him off. Everyone loves him.

I'm progressing, I think. I got nothing on most of the older guys, and even some younger. Really, there are 8th graders at my school who are built like brick walls and can bench 200 lbs. It's insane. I digress - I'm seeing a ton of growth in my delts, and I fill out shirts that used to be big on me. I was sick last week and still sort of am this week, so I honestly regressed a little, and my stomach's still fucked so I can't start slamming down steaks and chicken filets for the protein like I was doing two months ago. I also keep skipping out on legs like the pathetic namby-pamby I am, cause post-leg day feels like I'm an Ulster division soldier in the Western Front who's been squatting around in a trench all week. Despite all that, I feel like I'm doing pretty well for myself. It's insane what having a little muscle mass does for your confidence.. my dad's probably real fucking tired of me trying to bring him down and shadowboxing at him.