Yes that’s the date of today. Funny how I didn’t expect much from today, but something very obscure pleased me.

It was the Physics Olympics Competition of UBC today. After I got there at 8:30 in the morning (to sign up, when the actual thing starts at 9:30), I found no one in my team there. I went back to Transition and saw all of them there making hovercrafts and mechnical timer. These two were part of the competition that could be made before-hand.

The hovercraft did not turn out as great (or even satisfactory) as I thought. First of all, it did not work at all. It’s supposed to be a piece of board with a computer fan on top blowing air to the bottom, which is an air-filled bag thing that has holes on the bottom to push the thing up. There will be a huge fan behind the hovercraft to move it horizontally. And ours, well, wasn’t what was expected. It had a balloon bag thing on the bottom the size of a Chinese mouse pad, it didn’t float at all. Not at all.

So we kind of expected despair when we got to the hovercraft session. Despair was what we deserved, but not what we got. We were making jokes about how crappy and sad our hovercraft is, and half joking that the load on top of the hovercraft (which gives more points) can be the 20kg battery that sustains the computer fan. And that’s when the thought came through. Even though it didn’t work half as well as we joked it would be, it was funny to watch the judges faces twist like their hands were stapled to our fan. The score is calculated by 2BML/T. B is equal to 4 if our battery for the fan is self sustaining (not have to be carried manually). M is the mass of the load (our gigantic battery). L is the length in which the hovercraft moves. And T is the time it takes. So finding out that M is calculated in grams, we realized that the 20kg battery will be 20,000 x our points. Most people had 40 points. If we moved our hovercraft by 0.01 meters (1 centimeter), we’d get like 200 points and win it. But nooo, it didn’t move.

I didn’t see the mech timer. TOo busy watching Jeff pwn with RPG on my paid Inf account.

And after coming back to Trans after the competition finished, we realized our teacher has gone home (or at least left the building). The door was locked. I picked at the lock for half an hour before realizing that the room next door is connected to our room in the ceiling. The ceiling. I went in there, poked out one of the tiles, and jumped into our shaky room, and unlocked it! Yay!

The left over pizza is going to stink when we get back on Monday.