Rushank's Journal

I am reading this cool book called 'The Secrets of the Periodic Table' and it's fabulous. All the concepts are explained quite succinctly with clear illustrations. It feels great connecting my past knowledge with new ideas and straightening out my concepts. Also, I won a prize today! (as you might have inferred from the title). I officially completed the HCLS Summer Reading and, as a reward, I received two coupons plus a copy of 'Eight Tales of Terror' by Edgar Allan Poe. Lastly, I finished my calculus diagnostic tests - turns out I am ready - and finished six lectures in the first module of the 0th unit, with all of them correct; basically I'm off to a great start!

I'm too tired to write, so I'll list out my activities in the order that they happened. Woke up Binge-watched the Periodic Table of Videos, upto 21 (Scandium) Ate breakfast Read 'The Drunkard's Walk' by Leonard Mlodinow Helped my sister with maths Ate lunch Went to the library Finished Mlodinow's book Did a chapter from Matt Parker's 4D book, with paper constructions of topological marvels Logged on to edX to start my MITx Calculus 1A course. Did 3 diagnostic tests. Got all 3 fully correct, although I did have to use a second attempt on one geometry question Came home and ate dinner Did the laundry Wrote a long blog post on  Möbius loops  and did a few more experiments Now I'm going to sleep. . . . . .

I started and finished reading Randall Munroe's 'What If?' in a couple of hours today since it was so interesting I couldn't help myself. Looking forward to when I receive 'How To' from the library in a couple of days. I really like Munroe's style of teaching and his stickmen. My calculus course starts tomorrow. I'm quite excited; it's MIT's 1A on Differentiation and should make for a perfect introduction to calc, since the prerequisites are precalc and trig, which I have done. Basically, it's calculus for beginners. This'll be my first experience doing calc, and I'll try my best!

Today's main activities included reading Leonard Mlodinow, watching 3Blue1Brown, and studying physics through the app 'Quantum'. I really don't have that much to write about today, since I mostly did regular edX courses and other reading etc. Bye!

Today was fun! We went to Washington DC in the morning and toured some of the streets + the National Museum of American History. Also I finished reading Ben Orlin and started reading 'Thing Explainer' by Randall Munroe & 'The Drunkard's Walk' by Leonard Mlodinow. Trained another model in Keras and watched Numberphile. Also signed up for the Mars 2020 rover mission to carry my name to Mars! I'll also submit a name for the rover when the contest opens.

Hello to whoever is reading this. I thought I'd start a journal documenting my life -- starting today, August the 1st. I just moved to the US a month ago and it took me some time to get settled. It has been another oridnary summer day. Woke up and vacuumed the house with my mom. Took a bath and went off to the library. Read Ben Orlin's book and talked to my cousin Mohit in India. Came for lunch and rushed back again. Trained 2 neural nets with Theano and Keras. Made progress on my edX courses. Read some more Ben Orlin. Returned home, ate dinner and spent two hours trying to get the 1st neural network to predict something. Succeeded. I'm quite sleepy, so that's all for today.