Pi - an irrationally awesome sensation

Well, this past Friday was.... *drumroll*.... Einstein's Birthday! (and National Pi Day.) Alright... Sorry about the nerdy pun, but I had to. Was I the only one who ate pi(e)? I hope not. Anywho, I was reading a CNN new article the other day about the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter and I thought about how wildly crazy it was! I mean, sure it's pretty awesome, but doesn't e feel left out? Oh well.

Here are some celebrations from all around the country:

San Francisco, CA- The San Francisco Exploratorium holds an annual pi extravaganza including parade of people holding the digits of pi that ends at a "pi shrine" (pictured below).

Princeton, NJ- Einstein's home for his final 22 years, kicks off the weekend on Thursday and rolls into jam-packed activities on Friday, including a pizza pie-making contest, pie eating contests, a tour of Einstein's neighborhood, an Einstein look-alike competition, and, of course, a pi reciting competition. (and the winner walks away with $100π)

Overall, I think Pi Day really helps bring out our inner math nerd. It's a day to fascinate ourselves with the workings of mathematics and science and, hey, maybe we'll even find the next Einstein...

(Outside reading)

New Tri, New Plans :3

A while back, I read Divergent and Insurgent, both in the Divergent Trilogy by Veronica Roth. Last weekend, I began the final installment of the series, Allegiant. Right now, I'm on page 120 and since it's been so long since I'd read the other books, I'm LOST. It's not that it's a difficult read at all... Roth just alludes to the first two books so frequently that it's mind-boggling! I think I'm just going to read the first two books again. Any-who, the concept of the series is that there is a dystopian society in which people are classified by their personalities and put into "factions". As children, people live in the same factions as their parents, but once a year, a "Choosing Ceremony" is held and those who are 16 and have completed their "aptitude tests" (essentially personality tests that determine which faction you should choose), are given the choice to either leave their factions or take up a new one.

Each of the factions represents a specific virtue that members value. They are, according to Veronica Roth's blog, "Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent)". Personally, I think it was a mistake for the "founders" to structure the society in this manner because it is in human nature to have a diverse range of judgement classes to base reactions and actions upon, so it would be unnatural to make a person behave in a specific manner based upon the faction they were born into, or even the one they choose. This made the series rather predictable to me because these tight restrictions are unreasonable, evolutionarily, so it would obviously give way to people who don't conform: the Divergents. And with non-conformers comes revolution.

Blog Reflection... It's Over ALREADY?! :'(

Over the trimester, I think that my writing quality has improved immensely. In the beginning of the school year, my writing was rather dull and robotic. You can see this in my first post when I said, “One of the major themes in this novel was to trust and support your family members, even if they've hurt you. This first begins when Elgin Branch, Bernadette's husband, is overwhelmed by Bernadette's complaining and ranting about her hate for trivial parts of life in Seattle.” In my later posts, I tried to add more flair to my blog so that one could hear my voice more clearly. You can see the progression most obviously in my third to last post when I said, “It's just been sitting at the bottom of my backpack lately and I didn't think to actually finish it until Halloween when I was sitting on the staircase waiting for some poor group of children dressed in adorable costumes in the pouring, cold rain to knock on the door.” In addition to this, my grammar has somewhat improved over the past few months. After copy-pasting my first post into Word, there were several grammatical errors, but in my later posts, there were none that I didn’t intend to be there. Also, one might notice that my later posts aren’t nearly as long or chunky as my initial posts. Some of my more recent posts could actually be combined into one very long post, but I broke them down so that it’s easier to understand the individual segments. In fact, my first post was 415 words long!! The later post was half that length at just 236 words. This is definitely an improvement for me because I used to have trouble getting my thoughts out and being brief about it, which is partially why I don’t have a Twitter account. One hundred and sixty characters are not enough for me!

During my blogging experience, I had a lot of trouble remembering to post every weekend because I usually do several posts at once when I blog, so I generally did two or three posts at a time in case I don’t finish my two posts for one week. Another struggle I faced with blogging was that I often didn’t have enough time in class to finish one entire post, so I would save them to publish at home, but I don’t remember to publish it, so I ended up publishing 5 posts at the end of the trimester even though I wrote them when dinosaurs still roamed the earth…I met my reading goal for this trimester because I set my goal as 12 for 2013 and I read 5 books, which was my goal for this trimester. I generally used GoodReads to look for new books to read and to check if a book is worth reading or not. This helped me as a reader this trimester because I actually think about books that interested me so I became a more active reader. Well, more like a thinking reader… :D

Really, Now?

During my read of Born to Run, I came across a quote that struck me as odd. It read, "'No wonder your feet are so sensitive,' Ted mused. 'They're self-correcting devices. Covering your feet with cushioned shoes is like turning off your smoke alarms.'" I thought that this was really interesting because most of the time, you hear doctors encouraging good, cushioned shoes, but this book claims that your feet naturally correct themselves because of pain. This actually makes sense to me because your feet are designed to have a certain form when you run, but if you don't fall into that gait, it's probably going to be painful, until you get into stride. During cross country, I noticed that there were all kinds of running forms between the girls and they were so different that you could tell who a runner was from far away without even seeing her face, just by looking at how she was running. That's how diverse our gaits were! We had "jicky-jackers", "ballerinas", and even "hunchback"(me...)! Maybe it's because we all wear these expensive, cushioned running shoes...Hmm.... I wonder what would happen if the entire cross country team went a day of practice completely barefoot...

Oh, The Irony of Life.

1000 McNuggets. Now I don't know about you, but I wouldn't expect that the fastest man on the planet would eat that. But he does. As ya'll know, I've recently finished finished Born to Run, by Christopher McDougall, so I've been looking for other things to read about on Yahoo, when I came across an article about Usain Bolt's 2008 Olympic experience. Apparently, Chinese food didn't suit Bolt's taste, so he took a shot at McDonald's chicken nuggets, and ended up eating about 5 20pc. boxes every single day for ten days. I could never do that! I get bored of food after 2 days, much less 10! I wonder what those finicky sports nutritionalist people have to say about that... The fastest man on earth ate a thousand fried chicken chunks before he set the world record...Intriguing, no? You can find the article here.

YESH! FINALLY!

Yay!! I've FINALLY finished Born to Run! It's just been sitting at the bottom of my backpack lately and I didn't think to actually finish it until Halloween when I was sitting on the staircase waiting for some poor group of children dressed in adorable costumes in the pouring, cold rain to knock on the door. (Speaking of which, did anyone go Trick-Or-Treating??) All in all, I thought the book went over some interesting topics regarding running, such as barefoot running, whether running shoes are good or bad for you, what makes up a good diet, etc., but it would only interest runners. The middle-ish to end-ish section was kind of boring to me because it was talking about a really long, really boring race with people spaced miles apart. To be honest, I might have zone out during that part. Also, the initial problem in the book was lost sometime during the plot, but otherwise, this novel was really interesting to me. It actually makes me want to try out barefoot/minimalist running, but that's a bit hard in Mason since all we can run on is sidewalks, sidewalks, and more sidewalks. And the ick factor... Anyways, I would certainly advise this book as a good read, but only to people who are runners or have run long distances in the past. :D

If you would like to purchase this book, you can find it here.

Ultra Marathoners - Ahh! Why?

100 miles. That's longer than the distance between here and Columbus. In fact, it's only 85.3 miles between Mason and columbus. Ok, anywho, think about driving that distance. The whining that you do because of your legs hurting and having to go potty.... Now imagine running 100 miles. Yeah. Running. I can picture how you probably feel right now. Incredulous? Suprised? Shocked? That's definitely how I felt when in Born to Run, a runner named Ann Trason is mentioned. She's in my mind, a freak-athlete. She's broken 20 world records during her time as a ultra-marathoner, crushing both guys and gals. I can't even imagine running a marathon right now, not to mention an ultramarathon. Plus, Trason didn't just finish ultramarathons. She set unbelievable course records, too! Trason finished the Leadville 100 ultra in just 18:06.24! Did I also mention that the Leadville 100 includes elevations of 9,200 to 12,600 feet? My goodness. The path alone shown in the video sounds terrifying, but having to do that back AND forth? 
These runners are just ridiculous.....