As usual, I don’t feel like posting but I feel obliged to, especially since I haven’t issued a post in a while. (For your information, the recent lack of anime posts is a direct result of my recent lack of anime watching, and once I’m all caught up with everything I’ll post a big 2000-word mega anime post or something.)
Yesterday, I spent my entire free time after school writing solutions for our Math Team packet (11th grade; Logarithms and Exponents), and compiling everything. That’s a bummer, I guess, especially since, truth be told, I did most of the work — everybody submitted problems, but nobody bothered writing solutions for anything. The other group members just gave me a problem or two on paper. Aritro and James did the most; Aritro is a ninth grader who, according to Hank, has been practicing for the AMC/AIME/USAMO since he was in 6th grade or something. Aritro submitted three very challenging and intruiging problems and handwrote three very good solutions. James did the handout, but I ended up retyping most of it. Hank actually did work; he gave me three pretty nice problems that would be standard BML questions. Unfortunately, I had to write the solutions to his problems, and everybody else’s problems.
Let’s talk about the weather. I like it when it rains — I like it all except a) the mud puddles b) the possibility of catching a cold. Umbrellas are extraordinarily fun, and running around without one in the rain is more fun. It’s cold, and I dislike cold mornings, often putting on 4 or 5 layers of clothing in the morning, but at midnight I can usually be found running around the house in my underwear.
Last week, I thought I had caught a cold. One day, I woke up with a sore throat, and the next day I woke up with my nose feeling slightly stuffy. I had that “illness” taste in my mouth — I don’t know how to describe it, and I don’t even know if others experience it, but I just had a funny taste in my mouth that I couldn’t get rid of, no matter how many times I used mouthwash and brushed my teeth. It’s something that happens every time I get a cold or flu. Anyways, I was sure I was going to get sick again, stay in bed for a week, and fail a test or two when I got back. However, I decided to test out an idea I had for preventing cold/flu viruses from infecting you, or, well, decreasing the chance of infection.
So, you know how Asian moms and dads commonly tell you how if you wear too little, you might catch a cold? I think they’re right. But you don’t need to keep your whole body warm. Flu/cold viruses enter your body through either your nose or your mouth, right? If it infects your throat, big deal, sore throat for a day or two. The problem is not letting it infect your nose and sinuses. If the virus gets into your sinuses, you’re doomed to experience a week of illness, most likely. The thing is, these respiratory viruses can’t survive in temperatures that are too high. In fact, they are unable to survive at normal human body temperature (98.6 degrees F), which is why they can’t just go into your lungs, enter your bloodstream, and eat you alive. They can only replicate in places where the temperature is slightly cooler than the body core — the throat, for instance, is cooled by air passing through it, as is the nose. Also, they both happen to have direct contact with air, and the pathogens air contains.
So, my “experiment” last week was to continuously keep my nose warm by breathing through my mouth only, and occasionally warming my outer nose with my hands and my breath. The sore throat healed in two days, and my nose didn’t get infected. I didn’t get a cold at all, only a sore throat. This may have been pure luck, or my method may have actually epically decreased the chances of nose infection. Maybe this would make a good LA Science Fair project.
Also, yesterday, my dad fixed my computer’s SD card drive. He’s a genius at fixing things, both electronic and physical. The card wouldn’t go into the drive, and I was prepared to give up and just use another computer’s SD drive, but my dad heroically came by. I raised the topic of “Wow Dell stuff is crappy, do we still have warranty? Let’s return it!”, but he just went in, unplugged the drive, unscrewed open the case, and discovered that the spring applying pressure to the card (enabling better contact with the pins) was bent and blocking the entire slot. With a pair of pliers, he skillfully unbent the metal and repaired the drive just like that. And I was ready to toss the drive — it really makes me feel bad somehow.
Oh, and as for how today went; since I like doing things systematically:
- Soph Eng H – Villalobos – Tribe presentations. Everybody has such stupid names, such stupid slogans, such stupid logos. What is wrong with the world — the people who are stupid and come up with stupid names and don’t take things seriously are getting a better grade than me.
- P.E. – O’Brian – YES! We’ve finally finished basketball. Now we’re doing Ultimate Frisbee+Football. I dislike football as much as basketball, but I love Frisbee. It was superbly cold out there at 9am, though, so it wasn’t altogether that much fun running around the track and throwing Frisbees at each other (YES, O’Brian makes us RUN THE MILE while playing Frisbee at the same time! GENIUS!)
- Orchestra 3 – Forbes/England – Forbes wasn’t here, meaning Orchestra was fun today.
- Pre-Calculus – Daniels – no comment (coughhanchan101%)
- Mandarin 4 – Hung – I spent this entire period studying for my AP Physics test.
- AP Physics – Zheng – Lol, chapter 13 test. I forgot what the test was on already.
So, that’s how today turned out. And this puts this post’s word count at exactly 1007.
