The other advantage we have over the Chocobots (Columbia-Howard County Robotics) circa 2006 is we've got a coach who understands the FLL competition very well. We, the coaches, can do intelligent things like leverage the mission-driven nature of the FLL game to organize our classroom activities sensibly, nudge our team members down paths that we (I) expect to pay off, based on past experiences ("How about tackling a shorter mission first, for easy points?"). In short, we intend give our kids the best experience we can by being prepared.

This, on review, is extremely unfair to the former Chocobots coaches. They (that is, my father, and the father of another of the team's founding members) gave new meaning to the word prepared. For a pair that knew nothing of FLL before the team's founding, they did their research fast, and wrote lesson plans, tracked popular strategies published online, built demo models and prototypes (which were promptly disassembled after team critique and discussion), planned and executed field trips, brought in special speakers, built game boards, designed logos, and tracked down software, kits, and parts.

The one thing they didn't do for us was the work. FLL, of course, is about kids' efforts, not coaches' contributions. And

Earlier today, I realized that I was confused about something. (And then mentally told myself: "I realize that I am confused.", so I didn't immediately forget about it, and focus on something unimportant, like the uncountability of the Cantor Set.) My train of thought went something like:

Man, I can't wait to get lunch.

It's a shame that I can't just eat at Annenberg [freshman dining hall]. But at least the food is better in Eliot [my upperclassman house].

Actually, when I get home, what if I just take a nap instead? I'm not exceptionally hungry, and dining hall food is only mediocre at best.

But food is important! More important to you than any other hedonic pleasure, if your blog posts are to be believed...

So why don't you buy better food?

I realize that I am confused.

A fuller explanation requires a little background. I spent a significant amount of time this summer exploring ways to make my life more efficient. Polyphasic sleep was one of those, but even outside of that, my summer roommate and I spent a great deal of time discussing values, terminal goals, and effective operating modes. (For an example of what I mean, he's written up an introspective post on his life goals here. Maybe someday I'll have the free time to do something similar.)

One of the conversations we had was about food, and in particular, Soylent. For those of you not in-the-know on everything crazy, "Soylent" (not to be confused with Soylent Green) is one man's homemade attempt to create an all-in-one foodstuff-drink that includes everything the body needs -- and nothing that the soul desires. (I've

Today, I was late getting out of OS class, so I missed the 2:53 1 bus to Roxbury. And so I had to bike for about half an hour (I passed two 1 busses on my way, though -- never change, Boston) to get to Orchard Gardens Pilot School (hereafter 'OGPS' or 'OG').

I -- and the incredibly multitalented Diane Yang -- are volunteering with the nonprofit Citizen Schools to run an afterschool Lego Robotics team for the OGPS 6th grade. We'll be helping them to plan, design, build, and program a Lego Mindstorms robot to compete in the FIRST Lego League Challenge (FIRST, here is a forced backronym, not an adjective).

It should be an enormous amount of fun. I'm also incredibly scared.

You see, when I competed in FLL (three seasons, 2006-2008), I was coming from five weeks of summer camp where I had learned -- in some exhaustive detail -- the ins and outs of the Mindstorms RCX platform. (NXT is a definite upgrade hardware-wise, but the software level is basically the same.) The team of friends that I assembled included many, many good-at-math types who had been working with computers, Legos, and their intersection from young ages. And since meetings were at my house, my brother and I effectively lived with the robot, game

(1)

This is the last post on my first try at polyphasia. For convenience, I've listed all four of my previous polyphasic posts here:

• Greetings, Polyphasic Sleep, Chives (an introduction)
• Theory of Poly Sleep, Reports From the Field (some musings and a progress report)
• Tired, Dreams, Sunrise, BSG (some errata, and more field reports)
• Errata, Food, Reductionism (I try to explain why violating conventional wisdom on sleep is at all a good idea)

After missing two naps in a single day, I realized that this polyphasic thing wasn't going to work in China.

1. We didn't have breaks at the right times in the day.
2. I was incurring approximately 100% overhead on walking back to my dorm to nap.
3. The utility of my time was extremely phase-sensitive, which is to say that having extra hours during the night didn't help anywhere near as much as extra hours during the day.

So I stopped. Re-transitioning to monophasic wasn't precisely effortless, but it was still pretty easy (after all, I've had nineteen years practice). Oddly enough, I had this conversation with my (Harvard summer) roommate a few days before I left for China:

"We're doing pretty well, it seems."

"Don't be so confident; next week is when most people fall off the wagon."

Oh, well. We're not all abnormal all of the time.

(2)

In other news, I decided I was going to eat meat while abroad. It seemed pretty common-sense to me: if I put down every dumpling that turned out to have pork inside, I'd probably starve. I'm only sort of joking -- in a place where you can't speak the language and are

I'll reiterate that I'm not trying to evangelize for vegetarianism. While I don't eat meat, I have no problem with my friends who do. I suppose that, intellectually, I would prefer that people don't (though, that would probably hold true no matter which side of the fence I myself came down on), but it's not a strong enough preference for me to spend social capital, time, or any other resources spreading my vegetarianism, even to the people close to me. I simply don't care enough.

Yesterday I wrote about the events that led me to choose vegetarianism, and some of the beliefs that underlie my continuing choice. If there were a few intended takeaways, they were these:

• The modern meat-production industry is gross, from beginning to end. This is my opinion, and you don't have to agree with it.
• Agribusiness, like any industry presented with enormous demand, has undertaken a century-long drive to cut costs literally everywhere possible. And the meat industry -- delivering unthinkable quantities at historically low prices -- has cut more costs than anyone else. This is a fact, and you sort of do have to agree with it.
• My response to the two above points is to give my food money to what I perceive to be the lesser of (many) possible evils.

Three years ago, I attended my fourth year of the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth summer program. That year, my chosen course was Ethics (section B), and the instructor was Dr. Mark Ralkowski (which my have been a significant part of why I signed up for the course). The year was 2010, I was sixteen, and I'd been entrusted with the sacred laurels of the Poetry Goddess, organizer of weekly poetry-night readings open to all campers (and staff).

That year, Mark tried out a unit that he had developed for his college students (at U. New Mexico in those days...) on the ethics of agriculture. We read Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals, talked about eating animals, and stopped eating animals. (Every one of us except one boy nicknamed 'Steaknife', whose real name I can't remember for the life of me.)

Our reasons, as I recall, were mixed. Some of us cared about animal suffering, some about the environment, and some were just grossed out by the meat-packing industry. ('Meat-packing', I learned, is a term more relevant than ever today, as 'the packing of meat into small metal containers' accurately describes the lives of modern livestock as well as it does their postmortem processing.)

I'm really not sure why I went vegetarian. I do remember the moment that I stopped eating a plate of chicken tenders; I suddenly a-lieved that the plate of food I was putting into my mouth was the same product that had absorbed 10%-30% of its net weight from "fecal soup" -- that is, slaughterhouse-wastewater "cooling vats". And when I came home, I told my mother that I was a vegetarian

I've got a few not-China-related posts drafted that I'd like to have out there sooner rather than later. Specifically, I'd like to have them posted before I touch on one China-specific topic in particular, and no I'm not telling you what it is.

In case you only want to read about my China posts, and don't care about anything else I care to write about, I'll keep an (approximately) up-to-date list of posts I've tagged [China] running here.

• Departure, Arrival (six vignettes from New York to Beijing)
• Internet ("The engine room for internet is under construction...")
• Looking Backwards (seven billion people and the blue marble)