Health Diary 1

Today I began my first official class in Dahn yoga. Dahn yoga is from Korea.

I needed to take care of my body, and I could really tell my body needed some healing after the first week and a half from school. Major fatigue and stress. I didn't want to do weight training and cardio because it just hasn't been sticking.

So I did my first individual session this past Saturday and knew right away this was for me. Now I have a 3 month membership. Yes, it is pricey, but I needed the discipline and the incentive to go. It's similar pricing to going to Gold's Gym with a personal trainer. But Gold's obviously offers more for the same price. But, I wanted to do something holistic and A LOT closer to home.

After the first day, I am already feeling a change. My core is warmer and my head feels cooler (related to yin and yang in Chinese). Your core should be warm and through your blood stream it goes up to your cool head and that's how energy is given to it.

Ya, there is a lot of energy language, ki (chi in Chinese) and chakra, which many would see as weird magicalness. But I can relate science and these yoga principals well. Yoga helps put science at a spiritual level. Yes, I am putting science and spirituality at a similar level. If you want to have a science over spirit or spirit over science question we can discuss it in person. But as a Christian I believe science is God's way of us understanding our surroundings at a concrete level.

After yoga I had myself an epsom salt bath, highly recommended by Cecilia sabumnim (assistant manager) and other dowoonim (companion or a friend on the same path).

I'll let you all know how Tai Chi is tomorrow.

Math Diary Entry 1

This December I will be participating in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. To put it shortly, the Putnam Competition. It's an extremely difficult competition. The average is 0/120. Yes, 0.

I have been working on a question from last year's competition, question B3. You can read it in the pdf. My professor and I sat in almost complete silence for about 30 minutes doing this question. All I have to say is that it's not as weird as you would think, mostly because you are thinking real hard. About every 5 minutes we would say something about the problem, then realize something else and sit again thinking.

Now in the competition, we have 6 hours, 2 3 hour sessions, to answer 12 questions. So you have about 30 minutes each problem, but in each round the questions get progressively harder.

So my goal is to answer at least one question.

Also, in contemplating this problem, I laid in bed this morning for about 40 minutes thinking about the question. I came up with something that I hope will help lead to a proof for question B3. If two teams won their only game on the same day, it would be impossible for both teams to only win one game, since they have to compete against each other, and thus someone ends up winning two games instead of just one. So I'm hoping when I tell my professor this it will help get to some answer.

I really want to solve this problem because it was like 1 of 2 problems that I fully understood on the 2012 Putnam competition.

"Every Major's Terrible"

School's been busy along with working 18-30 hours a week. Yes, it varies that much because I work as a tutor and a babysitter, so things either cancel or jobs come up all the time.

But, a friend of mine posted this youtube video. I suggest you listen to it as you read the original comic by xkcd.com - Every Major's Terrible

I for one find great hilarity in this since I have switched majors like 8 times. From nursing, to engineering, to education, to computer science, back to education with mathematics underlying almost all of them. So I'm just sticking with Math for the rest of my undergrad career.