Back

It's been an adventure. After

• the race
• the vast expanse of nothingness that is Australia
• the carnivore's utopia of New Zealand
• the adventures of Thailand
• joining my dad's project, and
  
• chilling at home in Utah
  

...after all that, I'm back at Stanford now, five minutes out from my first lecture in six months. CS110: "Principles of Computer Systems." Based on MIT's 6.033, I hear. I'm also taking CS108, where I'll write an ungodly amount of Java, and CS109, stats for programmers, taught by the always-awesome Mehran.

The solar car team is meeting tonight for the first time since the race. A few fixes and, if all goes according to plan, we'll be rolling around campus on battery power, recruiting freshmen. Sometime between now and this summer, we'll have to build a new top shell and get ready for the North American Solar Challenge.

This will be an interesting quarter. More news as it comes in. Peace.

I'll be BAWK

Last weekend, we went on an epic roadtrip through California.

It's an annual section leader tradition, and this was its fourth year. On Friday afternoon, we piled into cars with food, sleeping bags, laptops, and cameras, and started our trip. The goal? Solving puzzles and getting places as fast as possible. BAWK is framed as an adventure game. The theme? Always a B-movie. This year it was Cannibal Women of the Avocado Jungle of Death The route? TBD. We go nowhere fast, then hang out and have fun.



It turned out that we were driving from Stanford to within 90 miles of Mexico on that first afternoon. It was a beautiful drive through the Sacramento Valley and the Mohave Desert.

Stop 1: the Salton Sea.



A rainbow on the way to Dinosaur Point (San Luis Resovoir).

We camped on the Salton Sea our first night. In the morning, we went to an abandoned trailer park that had sunk into a wet marsh. Pictures coming soon.



Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve.



Joshua Tree National Park.

On the way back, we made it to Big Sur before sunset. It was gorgeous.



Brandon, the B in BAWK and roadtrip planning genius.



The sun.




The sea.





The beach. We swam here.

I love the desert. I love the backroads, the cogs under the surface of society, the small towns that grow our food, transport our goods, generate our electricity. I love the freedom of driving with friends through the middle of nowhere, going wherever we want to go.



California is beautiful.

Happy Birthday!

to you.

Congrats!

Putnam math competition

This is really cool. Tonight, I joined the kids here who will give this math test a shot in a few months. We had an overflow crowd at our first meeting.

The professor who's teaching us the ropes in weekly sessions is a great guy.

Here's one problem I did, from the promo poster:

Find the smallest natural number n which has the following properties:
(i) its decimal representation has a 6 as its last digit, and
(ii) if the last digit 6 is erased and placed in front of the remaining digits, the resulting number is four times as large as the original number n.

If n starts with 6, and n = 4k, then k must start with a 1. So:

n = 61 ..,

k = 1 ... 6

Now the cool part: some recursive long multiplication.

Multiplying 6*4 gives you 24, so 4 is the last digit of n. This means that 4 is also the second-to last digit of k. So 4*4 +2 = 18. 8 is the second-to-last digit of n, and third-to-last digit of k. We know that 1 is the second digit of n, so eventually, we have to get to a 1.

    2
1....6
    x4
61...4

   1
1...46
    x4
61..84

  3
1..846
    x4
61.384

25
153846
    x4
615384

This is true. So I think that 153846 is the smallest n that ends in 6 where shifting the digits right gives you 4n.
I love this stuff.