This past weekend I attended the maker faire - a 2-day extravaganza of overly excited nerds showing off the cool stuff they'd made. It was incredibly fun experience and one that I would highly recommend. All of the exhibits were inspiring, but there was one that really stood out - an exhibit that you simply could not miss. This exhibit is a beautiful blend of music and math - A giant stage where music is played through Tesla Coils.

The show starts with a man wearing a chain mail suit walks in with an electric guitar. The guitar has a Faraday cage over part of the strings, and there are two giant towers on either side of the stage. When he starts playing, one million volts of electricity flow through the Tesla coils and on to his guitar and suit as a shockingly loud note fills the room. Arcs of electricity resembling white lightning come out from the Tesla coils and hit his suit. The combination of loud music and visuals of the Tesla coils emitting electricity is almost overwhelming.

The people who made the show are a bunch of very techy musicians. They love music, but also love physics and engineering and, you know, building Tesla coils. They found a creative way to combine their love of both physics and music in to one job. It is very possible, and could possibly be a future path for me.

Tonight marks the end of the second day of the Silicon Valley Regional. For those who don't know, the Silicon Valley Regional (or SVR for short) is a robotics competition held every year at San Jose State. While there are many regionals all over the country, SVR is widely regarded as the most competitive one and brings the best teams from all around the world. We have two incredible teams here from Texas, one from Florida, and of course the 2011 world Champions and reigning SVR Champion Bellarmine. Our robot paled in comparison to theirs and had a whole host of problems that kept us working nonstop for 12 hours yesterday and 11 hours today, but the regional was still enjoyable. Tomorrow will finish up the competition, after which robotics will be much quieter.

In music-related news, with the slow-down of robotics I hope to get back in to a more regular schedule of band practice soon, but am not sure if I'll be able to manage it with BBYO work as well.

In more music related news, this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_XgQhMPeEQ is a pretty great song to sing a capella.

I'm exhausted from working on robotics for such long and intense hours, so I'm going to call this blog entry long enough and hit the hay to get ready for robotics starting early tomorrow morning (I have to get to school at 7 ). Because of my exhaustion, I also apologize if this is terribly written.

Since I have been straying off of my initial subject of mixing music and math and have fallen in to ranting about time management, I decided to make this post back to the subjects of music and math. I'm actually going to talk about careers that use music and math - something that I doubt I will go in to professionally, but is definitely worth a try. The first and most obvious career is a composer - it takes substantial mathematical talent as well as a terrific musical ear to do well as a composer. In order to do that though, I would have to focus my college studies on music theory rather than engineering, so I highly doubt I will become a professional composer. I could go in to architecture and acoustics and create structures specifically designed to make music sound better. While this is more engineering-focused, sound and waves was one of my least favorite chapters of physics B, so that's not probably my cup of tea. Lastly, I could design and program music-related software. This would go nicely with my current college plans as I am likely to major in compsci or software engineering, and would allow me to work with music. I could write software that reacts to music, edits music, or even creates music. If I was to go into a music-related career, a software-music combination would be the most likely option. However, if I don't go into that profession, a very very likely situation, making music would still make a great hobby.

This blog post is going to waver a bit from my theme of balancing the different aspects of my life and focus on my largest time-suck right now: robotics. Robotics is incredibly relevant to my ideal  egingeering/math/compsci career because it is a microcosm of a STEM business.

There is a product that needs to be built, an end result. This project has a timeline, one final date by which it must be finished. There is a set budget, and a bill of materials must be kept. There are subdivided teams that must be managed, and each subdivided team has deadlines that match up to meet the master deadline. There are people in charge working on management, and a somewhat hierarchical structure. Westmont's robotics team, and nearly all successful robotics teams, are run similarly to a business.

Now, given the current curriculum  it seems fitting to evaluate whether Apollo robotics #3482, Westmont's robotics team, is a new rules or six sigma business. Given that I write part or most of the rhetoric that is put out about our time, I'll skip the boring quote analysis and go straight in to my conclusion. Apollo robotics is a new rules business because, although there is a finished product that can be easily rated, the goal of robotics is not to create a perfect robot. The goal, the mission statement that hasn't quite been written yet, is to promote STEM education in a fun and innovative way, and give all of the students of Westmont a chance to try out STEM fields in an actual application. We are not expecting to create a perfect robot, we are just trying to make a robot that we can be proud of. Passion is key, not perfection.

And it is that passion that has kept me in robotics although I have so many other thing that I would like to work on. I have grown incredibly attached to the team, and am looking forward to making it even stronger in the future. Hopefully though, it won't take up so much of my life after the season is over.

I'm realizing that the more effort I put in to one thing, the less effort I have to put in to other activities. This may seem incredibly obvious, but I didn't fully realize how true it was until these past few months. Seeing band practice start to drop off my list of extracurricular activities was hard. I had to choose between doing a few things well and doing more things not-as-well, and made my decision to do bbyo, school. and robotics really well. And as difficult as it was to make, I do realize that this was the right decision.

Last year I wrote my SHARP about why wars of conquest never win: the leader always gets greedy and bites of more than he can chew. My argument was simply that power makes potential world conquerors try to grow too big too fast, and consequently collapse. Looking back, I realize that if I had kept up all of the extracurriculars that I started or spent time on, I would collapse. I would have had no time to do any of them well, and would be overwhelmed and defeated. Just like Napoleon and conquering Russia, I need to wait to focus on band practice until I'm not as busy. If Napoleon had simply waited until he was finished with Europe and winter was over, he could have focused his efforts on Russia and taken it by storm. I want to learn from Napoleon's mistakes and wait to take Russia. That way, I can lead a successful, happy high school life and not have to be banished to small unimportant islands.

Hopefully someday making music will become a large part of my life again, but until then I'm afraid that it's just going to have to take a backseat to other hobbies. 

I know that the blog entries are supposed to be mainly related to the initial theme presented, and I do plan to stick to the theme of music and math as a career choice, but right now I want to talk about an upcoming incredible experience.

               I was invited to attend a 3-day high school summit in Washington DC planned by AIPAC (American Israel public affairs committee) about a month ago, and this conference starts this Sunday. I am especially excited for this trip because I will get to learn more about Israel, improve my public speaking skills, get to lobby to congress, and make international friends, all lumped in to a 3-day experience. This conference is very relevant to AP Lang because I will learn how to present information from a certain point of view in a certain manner, and use rhetoric effectively in order to lobby to congress. This is going to be an incredibly jam-packed, intense, ridiculously fun 3 days, and is definitely going to be worth missing two days of school. I know that this post isn't necessarily up to my previous standards, but since I'm taking a redeye flight tomorrow I really need to get some sleep so I can get the most out of the AIPAC high school summit.

I find it ironic that since I posted my first blog entry on the wonderful relationship between math and music and how music is such an important part of my life, that relationship has started in a downward spiral. The STEM part of my life is starting to take over, and I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with that. With the combined load of leading two branches of Westmont Robotics, helping lead and creating agendas for a Middle School team that I played a large part in founding, helping Rodrigo start STEM Club, working on the SPHERES programming challenge, taking 7 classes at Westmont and taking an extra on-line math course, my workload is ridiculous. I am starting to have serious time management issues, which is a really important problem to deal with, because it is one that will be relevant throughout my whole entire lifespan.

My robotics work, however excessive, is something that I love doing and that is close to my heart. I have fully immersed myself in this club this year, and am already far too deep to back out, even if I wanted to. It is closely related to all of the majors I am currently looking in to, and is also something that I honestly enjoy doing. However, I do need to make sure to check myself and not put so much in that the other areas of my life suffer.

On the music side of things, I haven't had band practice since before my first blog post. Because I have had band practice every week or every other week pretty much for the past two years, this is in my opinion a huge problem. I need a way to use my creativity, to vent my emotion. I am honestly afraid that if I stop having enough time in my life for band practice and can't do that, other things might also fall. If I stop having band practice, I might start playing less and less guitar at home until I stop all together. I already play a lot less than I used to at the beginning of the school year simply because I don't have as much time. Music is still an integral part of my life though, and I intend to keep it that way. I need to turn down the science in my life in order to turn up the music.

I need to check myself before I volunteer for another huge STEM-related project.

I need to take the time out of my life to write a song every now and then.

I need to make sure that I don't overload myself with work, that I take the time to relax instead of doing that extra robotics work. If I don't do the extra robotics work, a meeting might not be as great as it could be. If I don't relax, I could overwork myself and fall apart.

I know this might sound like the slippery slope fallacy we learned about in class, but I really think that band practice is such an important part of my life because it is something that requires creativity and intellect, but is not math, not engineering, not science. It is a different way to relax and express myself, and have fun doing something that I love.

When I go on in life, I really hope I won't let go of music, because music is a really important part of who I am.