Moody and Angry!

This one is pretty late, but I thought I'd publish it anyway just because our day was pretty hilarious.

I got there in the morning at 0700 and we started working on the problem. This year's problem was aptly named ``Making sense of the 2010 Census'' or something like that. Pavel and I worked on #1, while Jared and Ian tackled #2 and Mark had fun with #3. Pavel and I had our ideas and a few paragraphs of text down by lunch, by which time we went to eat pizza. In the afternoon, we slowly edited our paper and added more information.

Around 1515, some salespeople knocked on Mark's door. Pavel told Mark to get the door, and when Mark was about to open it, he stood there for about five minutes and contemplated if he should XD When Mark finally opened the door, they convinced Mark to subscribe to their religious magazine. Too bad for them that we were in the middle of M3 and Mark is an atheist. After they left, we started making jokes about them as they slowly left the doorstep.

How many times do you need to witness Jehovah?
Over 9000!

You're a Jehovah's witness, aren't you?
Why else would I use Linux?

Then around 16:30 we took an ice cream break! Distracted, Mark pulled up the Russian version of ``Be a Man'' (or whatever it's called) from Mulan. Ian pulled up one of the Aladdin song to keep us distracted and Pave started ranting how useless Jasmin was. Around 1700 we went back to work to proofread.

Not long after, Mark's mom asked us if we were fine with getting Fuddruckers' for dinner. When she came back with two bags of burgers and Mark's sister about an hour later, Pavel pointed out that Mark was still in his pajamas. That gave Mark plenty of ideas that Pavel wanted him to take his pants off [to put something else on] XD

Around 1830 we were taking about some statistics stuff, when Mark discovered a huge hole in our argument (we just assumed a sample was normal) XD Then we went to eat our burgers and finished adding and revising content. By 2000 Mark told everyone to cease editing on the Google Doc so Pavel could put finishing touches on our paper and ship it to the Moody's folks. We shipped out the paper at 2055, helped Mark clean up our messes, and left.

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So it appears that we have advanced to the finals, and our presentation is this Wednesday. Unfortunately for Pavel and Ian, they'll have to skip the second day of USAMO. Anyway, we look forward to going to NYC by way of flying from EWR to JFK a stretch limo and competing against the top applied mathematicians. :) I still have lots to practice, but hopefully we'll all be ready in two days.