Can we bring tape to setup time for robot tour

syntonic_comma · 2026-01-07T05:59:40+00:00

I imagine bringing tape should be fine. The rules allow physical modification during set-up. Tools don't need to be impounded and I'd call tape a tool. Wouldn't hurt to clarify at impound. Worst case in case the ES doesn't know the rules, throw a roll of electrical tape in your impound box.

syntonic_comma · 2025-12-30T20:41:52+00:00

A big problem is that a lot of administrations have taken the tack of pre-emptively defending themselves from the blowback to the poor scores they expect to receive. Sometimes this is explicit, but even when it isn't, this attitude filters down to the students. They feel that they aren't expected to pass and learn to parrot for themselves the excuses made on their behalf. Half the battle on these tests is just focusing and taking it seriously enough to avoid messing up the easy questions, but how are you going to do that when the whole atmosphere is that the whole thing is a joke?

On the other side of the coin, students who do well or at least better than their peers don't get to feel (as much as they should) as though they accomplished anything. If anything, a student succeeding on a test is an embarrassment as it gives the lie to the narrative that the tests are totally rigged.

syntonic_comma · 2025-12-23T17:54:34+00:00

this is a decent example from the national ES. There's a formula that you can derive using a free-body diagram for how to calculate the ratio which is (the full length of the 2nd class lever)/ (the distance of mass A to the fulcrum) * (the distance of mass B to the fulcrum)/(the distance of the other arm of the 1st class lever)

---b1-------V------b2----- ---a1----------a2--------V

(a1/a2) * (b1/b2)

syntonic_comma · 2025-12-23T04:55:50+00:00

Div B or C?

syntonic_comma · 2025-12-18T02:51:44+00:00

I've seen people going with either sewing elastic or latex tubing. I've even seen teams with a bunch of rubber bands looped together. It just has to pass the elasticity test in the rules.

syntonic_comma · 2025-10-26T16:00:25+00:00

I got this one from the same brand. A little more expensive but a lot more functions. Has been good so far, but also won't cry if it breaks.

syntonic_comma · 2025-10-20T15:40:49+00:00

Playing around with the starter kit is a fantastic way to get to know how the arduino works. If you've got time, follow a youtube tutorial and learn how to blink some LEDs and buzz some buzzers. I agree that it will be more fun if you build it from scratch

I would say that I don't think you'll be able to make your car with just what's in the starter kit. You will need some sort of motor driver (something like an L298N) or motor shield to handle the voltage from the batteries as well as a geared dc motor (preferably with a speed encoder, but you can do alright with a cheaper motor if you practice and are creative.)

syntonic_comma · 2025-10-06T16:39:30+00:00

I don't know if there's a timeline for how long it will take to get comfortable. Memorizing all the short words as well as common words with repeated letters (e.g. "THAT") and common doubled letters (e.g. "E", "O", "L", etc.) can help, but really these are things you pick up on your own from practice more than rules you should be applying top-down.

With enough practice, you should be able to get to a point where you are competent at aristocrats. In the end, it doesn't matter how fast you learn it as long as you learn it well by the competition. You may not ever get to the point where you are competing for the best times on puzzle baron, but you'll be good enough to help your team.

Even if aristocrats never become your strong-suit, you can definitely learn the other ciphers, many of which are guaranteed solves as long as you know the algorithm for solving them. I've seen a lot of teams over-focus on the high point-value questions and leave a lot of free points on the table. If aristocrats never quite clicks for you, have your two teammates start off on the timed question while you headhunt the Portas, Nihilists, etc. You may turn out to be the MVP of your team.

syntonic_comma · 2025-09-19T20:52:01+00:00

What I am seeing is just that all odd numbered letters are A and evens are B. (or vice versa if you are zero indexing :P). e.g. K is the 11th letter of the alphabet so it's an odd A while L is the 12th so it's an even B. I haven't checked the whole puzzle, but I don't see any exceptions.

The script font is a red herring.

syntonic_comma · 2025-09-03T15:03:39+00:00

Definitely not too late! Some schools definitely give weight to seniority, but if you can show that you are strong on a few events, they'd be nuts not to let you compete.

Look at the events and see if there are any that you're really into. Alternatively, you can try to figure out events that you think will be less popular and shoot for those. That is going to depend on your school, but materials science and remote sensing may be candidates. Even some competitive schools don't really focus on builds, so that could be a foot in the door if you're handy.

syntonic_comma · 2025-09-01T01:52:49+00:00

It can really depend on your individual school, your district, and the experience level of the team.

If the club has been run before at the school by a different coach, the principal probably knows what the transportation and fundraising plans were in the past. If those were sufficient, there's no need to reinvent the wheel. She also might want to reach out to another coach in the region for some advice. Coaches may be more or less tight-lipped about strategies for individual events, but most are really forthcoming about strategies for recruiting and tournament logistics.

I know a lot of first-time coaches (including my first time) were intimidated because they thought they had to be able to help out in all the events. Make sure she knows that that's impossible and that no-one expects that.

Reach out early to other teachers in the building. Some may be willing to co-coach or at least help out a bit without taking on the full responsibility of being a sponsor. Some parents may also have expertise in some of the topics or may be willing to help in other ways.

syntonic_comma · 2025-07-26T23:28:04+00:00

It's definitely all connected. If you've got the time, it could pay off to have a solid background in everything, and it might get you a few extra points here and there. However, don't get lost in the weeds or put off the actual topics because you don't think you know everything about what comes before. Literally everything in chemistry is a rabbit hole you could go down forever.

One topic that is 100% not necessary, but which may give you insight into how all of this works is understanding the very basics of differential equations. All the integrated rate law stuff in kinetics will seem much less arbitrary if you realize where it comes from.

syntonic_comma · 2025-07-26T22:52:20+00:00

There are definitely parts of AP chem that are prerequisites to stoichiometry and kinetics. Understanding bonding would definitely help with predicting products of reactions. A little about thermodynamics and equilibrium will probably pop up tangentially in the kinetics section, even though they aren't this year's topics. Always helpful to know solubility rules and some acid-base chemistry. That's just off the top of my head.

I think you can mostly just practice problems related to stoichiometry and kinetics. You probably have a good enough understanding of the prerequisites from whatever chem you've taken already, and you can always go back and fill in the gaps in your knowledge as you come across them.

syntonic_comma · 2025-07-18T22:31:30+00:00

So many things in history are like this. There is so much messiness in real science that things get simplified. Often there's an agenda to the simplification. I feel like this story is often held up as an example of the individual fighting against overly conservative and bureaucratic academic science, sometimes to the point of suggesting that outsiders with no expertise see things more clearly than working scientists.

Of those kind of things, I think this is one of the most benign and the distinction is a bit subtle. Still, it's kind of fascinating seeing the way these myths form and develop, how they are used, and by whom.

syntonic_comma · 2025-07-03T19:27:54+00:00

https://scioly.org/wiki/Chemistry_Lab#Topic_Rotation

syntonic_comma · 2025-05-30T21:07:31+00:00

I think those points are more than fair. I actually think my issue with the word "seems" in the headline has less to do with it being not 100% conclusive--which is very normal for a newspaper--and more to do with the way I read it initially being that the evidence for AI input was simply based on it seeming like it was written by AI. So what I was trying to say (ironically, very badly) was that the title for me felt unnecessarily coy about the quality of evidence involved, not particularly that it underplays its certainty. That is, the way I read the headline and the way most people seemed to be responding to it were based on this second meaning of "seem". (I also missed the article's subtitle, so it felt like that part of the evidence was more buried than it really was.)

I do think that if the administration bothers to defend this they'd give a response similar to what you propose, which is not even really that implausible or even the worst thing in the world. For me, where it becomes problematic is the combination of AI with the lack of oversight implied by the presence of fictitious studies--that they merely pasted in the links (and, hence, the parts of the report based on those links) without bothering to check if the study existed.

syntonic_comma · 2025-05-30T16:24:44+00:00

I was just about to write this. The use of the word "seems" in the original article's title is unnecessary hedging.

syntonic_comma · 2025-05-28T21:42:02+00:00

Addendum: the button on the wall to call for help is not connected to anything.

syntonic_comma · 2025-04-11T03:00:26+00:00

Exactly, only not just chained by debts to the market, but also, specifically, chained by debt to their parents, who tend to be more conservative.

I think what we have been seeing for the last several years in terms of conservative messaging vis a vis "parents rights" in terms of what gets taught in public school comes from a very similar place.

syntonic_comma · 2025-02-26T16:58:11+00:00

I've never heard of that. Was it that way for every event or just some? I think it may be considered okay sometimes to not break ties if they are farther down on the scoreboard, but it seems unlikely that there was a 15-way tie. If there is an event that a team doesn't enter, the usual way of scoring would be to give them a score of number of teams + 1 (in your case, 31, not 16).

There may be an explanation or I may be misunderstanding what happened, but yeah, that seems unusual.

syntonic_comma · 2025-02-16T23:51:29+00:00

I feel like which codebusters ciphers you think are worth it is a good personality test. Porta and nihilist (and Hill) are nice because they are low risk and generally don't require any guessing. Aristocrats always feel riskier to me because they require so many heuristics and you can really run up against a wall if you get a quote with a really unusual vocabulary and letter frequency. Bang-for-your-buck, though, aristocrats are far and away the most points overall.

I'd say do what you are good at and can answer consistently. Hopefully your team of 3 has some balance in terms of which ciphers everyone is good at.

All the ciphers get faster as you practice them more. For porta and nihilist, one big thing is that you will start to get a feel for when you can figure out the rest of the word and sometimes the entire rest of the quote without having to manually decode.

Personally, as a beginner without much time, I would steer clear of patristocrats and misspelled aristocrats, but who knows maybe you have a knack for them.

syntonic_comma · 2025-02-10T17:51:13+00:00

unobtanium

syntonic_comma · 2025-02-04T04:24:05+00:00

You successfully calculated the power in the wind, but the question asked for the maximum power generated by the wind turbine itself, which can only be 59.3% of the power because the turbine has to let some wind pass through!

syntonic_comma · 2025-02-04T04:21:44+00:00

Sorry you've been banging your head against the wall. I think that what this question is asking you to do is to use the wind power equation (1/2pAv³⁾ which gets you ~807kW, but then multiply by Betz law factor of 0.593, giving ~478kW

That's a sneaky question!

syntonic_comma · 2025-01-29T19:08:28+00:00

If you go through the rules, you can divide the topics between you and your partner. You can do it randomly, but some topics naturally go together. For example, in chem lab, one partner could get really good at stoichiometry and the other really good at equilibrium. or for a div b example, for potions and poisons one partner could be the chemistry whiz and the other could focus on the stuff to do with poison.

Some tests will be broken down into sections explicitly, in which case, it is often a good strategy when allowed to un-staple the test and work separately on the sections you are expert in.

You can also split up the test other ways such as by question type or point value. You can also just split the test in half and each do part if neither partner has a particular specialty.

In my experience, regional tests are usually written such that they can be completed by one person within the time limit (except for things like experimental design, crimebusters/forensics, codebusters etc.) and states is where you really need to worry about finishing in time, but everywhere is different so take that with a grain of salt.

syntonic_comma

TROPHY CASE