Vector Gloves!!

Captain's blog, stardate 2888.3....
So yesterday it was cold out and my friend was wearing some gloves she bought at the Coop. If you don't know much about MIT, the Coop is our campus store that sells merchandise with "MIT" written all over it, textbooks, and a ridiculous number of Star Wars and Star Trek books, which I always stare enviously at for a few minutes, wishing I had the money to buy them all and the time to read them all. If you do know a lot about MIT, that's still what the Coop is.

So anyway, these gloves had little plastic-y patterns on the palms to help the wearer grip things, and said plastic-y patterns took the form of circles with Xs inside of them.

Physics time! (Yaaay!)

This is how we denote a vector pointing into the page.



This is what the pattern on the gloves looks like. It's just like having vectors pointing into your hands!! Obviously I had to go buy some. (I'm such a sterotypical teenager.)

With my new gloves, I can pretend to be an electric flux superhero, absorbing the electric field into my amazing power gloves, storing it in magic capacitors inside the gloves, and then discharging the capacitors to shoot lightning from my hands! It would be more useful if one of the gloves had the symbol for vectors pointing out of the page, so I could shoot lightning without having to build up a stored electric field first, but oh well. Every superhero needs some sort of flaw. (I plan to make a comic book about this as soon as I buy a decent pencil sharpener.) And anyway, the power to absorb electric fields might be more useful, because that way you can get rid of any Force lightning that happens your way, and eventually fire it back at the Sith attacking you.

Oh, and if you don't think Star Wars has anything to do with vectors, you are wrong. I did a Google Image search for "vector pointing out of page" and got no results that actually showed a vector pointing out of a page. I did, however, get this:

Seriously, Google?

Another Update (Finally!)

Captain's blog, stardate 2947.7....
I know I'm being horribly slow to update. Sorry about that. It's so hard to find the time to do a post, although I know being busy isn't a very good excuse not to stay in touch with people.

So let's see, what's happened? Oh yeah, Thanksgiving. That already seems like it was about a billion years ago. But it was really fun. I got to see my high school friends, and some of my teachers, at homecoming, which was super exciting. They're all doing their college applications now...poor kids. If you guys are reading this, know that you shall finish everything and then get into an awesome college and have loads of fun, just like I'm having right now. (Obviously, MIT is the best of all possible colleges, but if you go somewhere else that's fine too.) So anyway, Thanksgiving. Sorry, I'm really tired right now, but I want to at least try and write something before I get too busy again and don't have the time. Yeah.

So on Thanksgiving, my whole family was there, and I played D&D with my brothers and my sister Maggie. We had to teach my little brother Stephen how to play: I don't think he really understood the rules, but he gathered enough to throw ninja stars at monsters when it was his turn.
Sample Dialogue:
John and Elizabeth: *doing arithmetic*
Maggie: So Stevie, do you want to ask John to give your character a Justin Bieber CD for his birthday?
Stephen: Sure. Is it my turn yet?
Elizabeth: Yes.
Stephen: I throw a ninja!
(Don't worry, we don't like Justin Bieber. Or rather, we don't like the two measures' worth of one of his songs that we've somehow heard.)

Thanksgiving pretty much rocked, but of course I didn't get any work done because I was too busy having fun with my siblings. So when I got back here, I had to write a draft of my final paper for Shakespeare class and do problem sets for all my other classes. Not fun at all. And on Monday I was super tired and couldn't focus at all, so I didn't really get much done. But I worked really hard yesterday and today so now I'm pretty much finished.

Other miscellaneous bad stuff: I got a really low grade on my physics test, but the average was only two points more than my score, so statistically I was average. Anyway I'll, like, study and stuff, so there's no need for parents and/or authority figures to bug me about it. I know what I'm supposed to do, OK? Anyway, now my test average in physics is an 82, which, since our professor says he won't curve our scores, is a B-. And I was telling my friend about this, except I said B flat instead of B minus. The most reasonable conclusion to draw from this is that I need to sleep, so I think I'll go do that now.

Sorry this post wasn't very entertaining! Perhaps next time I get around to it I'll have something more interesting to say.