Swimming

Swimming The hot summer sun bares down on me, making my shoulders feel as if they were in a pizza oven. My back would be burned, if not for the endless amounts of sunscreen my parents make me put on. I stare in to the blue water below and think of how cold it will feel when I dive into it. Usually, that is a bad thing, because that would mean I would have to warm up, but I realize I won't mind the temperature, because of the amount of adrenaline coursing through me. IM, I remind myself. I am swimming an individual medley. That means butterfly first. My coach swoops past and reminds me that the IM order is butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, and freestyle. That is so very helpful. It's not like I've known that since I was seven, my first year of swimming. I start wondering why coaches tell us things like that. Is it just to annoy us? I look down to see that the heat before me has finished. At the whistle, I step up onto the block.  The timer guy announces the event, and the heat number. "SWIMMERS, TAKE YOUR MARKS" The Speaker system is extremely loud. I grab the bottom of the blocks with my hands, and tense up, ready to dive in. BEEEEEEEEP, the starting system exclaims, and I push off with my feet and fling myself at the water. This is very cold, I think before I start kicking.

photo credit: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/clappstar/8018679832/">clappstar</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/">cc</a>

House of Stairs

House of Stairs

House of Stairs is a book where five teenagers wake up in a room with nothing except for stairs. They could not see any ceiling, or a floor, or any walls, just stairs. They find a red machine that gives out food, but only when the lights are flashing. When the lights are flashing, they have to do a dance to get food before the lights stop flashing. They find out that to get the lights to flash, they need to do something harmful to one of the others. Two of them see that people are trying to turn them against each other, and try to resist it.

I liked this book. The plot line was very interesting, and some of the characters were very likable, and others I wanted to punch in the face. This book made me want to keep reading it and not put it down. I would recommend this book to people who like books that are sci-fi that are not extremely action packed

Confusion

Confusion
Today, math was confusing. When I first walked in to the room, we had to go to the science lab, where there is the Promethean board that you can barely write on, and there is always water on the tables. We had to prove something about inscribed angles in circles, but it would take an hour explaining what it was. When we first started to work on it, I got extremely confused about different mathematical properties and how they all worked to solve this problem. Time seemed to stop, and I could no longer understand anything people were saying. My brain seemed to stop working, although many other people in my math class seemed to understand it, at least better then me. I decided to read all the steps on the board over again to try to understand it. Afterwards, I could actually start to understand how it was done. When it was time to prove the next conjecture, I could actually start to get it. When it was time to leave, I left actually knowing how to prove it.

photo credit: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/naviniea/2850458222/">naviniea</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">cc</a>

Feed

Feed
Sometime in the far future, all kinds of information are constantly streaming into people's heads through computer chips called feeds. Titus (although the only way to find out his name is the back of the book) lives in this world, and cannot imagine life without feeds. His feed is hacked, along with his friends, but they get them running again. He later finds out that one of his friends feeds was permanently damaged and may result in severe consequences.

I enjoyed this book. It was a good science fiction book and painted a cool picture of the future. I would recommend this for 12 and up because of language.

Slice of Life 2: Banana Boat

Banana Boat
I step out on to the warm beach, the bright Caribbean sun shining down on me. My family and I were going to go on a banana boat ride in the Dominican Republic. At the ticket booth, we are asked to put on life jackets. My parents assure me that I won't need them. We get on a little dingy that takes us out to the ocean, where we get on the banana boat. The guide inflates one pontoon of the banana boat, and then starts pulling us with the dingy. Water splashes everywhere as we bound across the waves and then suddenly, I feel the weight start to shift under me, and then the thing I feel next is water all around. When I swim to the surface I see the banana boat on it's side, and then everyone else in the water around me. We flip the banana boat back over and get back on. Fifteen seconds later, we are back in the water, with the banana boat on it's side. We get back on the dingy and watch as the guide inflates the pontoon again, and then not knowing better, we get back on. We start bouncing back to the dock, when a big wave hits us, and we are back in the water. We get in the dingy, and head back to the dock. I got out laughing, and ran up the beach. We then observed the people after us get on the banana boat, and flip over. They flip over again, and then get tangled in a rope. We watch and then head to the pool.

photo credit: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/articnomad/241014979/">JoshuaDavisPhotography</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">cc</a>

The Science of Interstellar

The Science of Interstellar 

This week, I read The Science of Interstellar, by Kip Thorne. If you have seen the movie Interstellar, you would know how many scientific concepts it has inside it. This book explains all of these concepts, and how they are integrated into the movie. Kip Thorne, the author, actually worked on the movie, and some parts talk about the making of the movie. This book talks about everything from wormholes, to singularities, to tesseracts. This book is extremely complex, and the concepts are hard to understand, so I am going to have to read it many more times. Even though it was non fiction, and not very exciting, it was extremely interesting and kept me reading it. I would recommend this book for people who have seen Interstellar, and have an interest in relativity and the laws of the universe.

Math Class

Slice 1-Math Class

Complete and utter chaos. That is what described our math classroom today. On Tuesday we are going to have a test, and we were doing review. This is not a very straight-forward chapter, and we all were pretty frantic about the test. I knew it was going to be crazier than usual, but I didn’t know how crazy until I walked into the classroom.

When I walked in people were complaining about how annoying the homework was, or about how confused they were about a proof, and also about how Katie was going to play us the voice of an evil computer and did not. When the review session started, everybody started talking over each other, and the room got really loud, really fast. It sounded like a cacophony of people talking, with words such as congruent and isosceles sometimes sticking out. This chaos lasted for the rest of class, until we left the room.

photo credit: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/boutmuet/3375400468/">JohnathanLobel</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/">cc</a>