two weekends in a nutshell

Weekend #1: November 11-12
Along with some friends from school as well as the Pivotal Girls Who Code program, I attended my first overnight hackathon at Gunn High School! It was an interesting experience to say the least, being surrounded by so many other computer geeks. Our team coded a web application that allows the user to chat with a punny farm animal (click the link to try), and we were pleasantly surprised to have it win an award for best domain name. Unfortunately, we still have no idea how to clear the database of chat logs, so we hold no responsibility over what anonymous users post there. The following list contains some things I learned that weekend.

1. Stickers to hackers is like catnip to felines. Seriously.

WOWW SO MANY STICKERS!

2. How to learn cybersecurity skills through Major League Hacking's partnership with Watchdog 2 to create a virtual Capture the Flag challenge. (Tip: find the hidden html files)

3. Soylent is an acquired taste. Apparently, drinking three bottles is equivalent to a full day's nutritional needs, but my friend and fellow hacker described it as a very milky yakult. 

4. The range of ideas that high school hackers can come up with is incredible! Projects included a Bernie Sanders RPG game, virtual reality simulations, credit card scanners for grocery shopping, and reddit re-post detectors. Instead of feeling intimidated, everyone was extremely helpful and fun to work with.

5. Pulling an all-nighter is extremely difficult. As I was walking around outside at 4AM trying to stay awake, I noticed other students either passed out in their sleeping bags or in a state of "wouldn't notice if a zombie apocalypse happened in the next five minutes."

Our hackathon team's lovely faces after not sleeping for 24 hours.

6. We felt pretty nervous pitching our project, as it wasn't especially technical or life-saving, put when people understood the light-hearted nature of our goal in making people happy by laughing at animal puns, it was a cool moment B)

GunnHacks we are coming back next year!

Weekend #2: November 19
This weekend, our female STEM club members participated in the Young Women's Engineering Symposium, hosted at Notre Dame High School in San Jose. I learned about this event from the Janksters (an all-girls robotics team from Notre Dame) during Calgames, so I was eager to see how it would turn out.

I personally attended three workshops, for Software, Aerospace, and Electrical engineering. Each workshop included a woman in the field speaking about her experiences as an engineer and the projects she worked on. All of the presentations were extremely engaging, especially the bit about Ms. Albuz building a 7,000 piece Lego autonomous car in college. Unfortunately, it seems as if I have another conundrum, as now I want to be an artificial intelligence programming electrician who is an astronaut in outer space. Just kidding, but nonetheless, all the fields were intriguing.

The wonderful speakers who shared their knowledge of industry with us.

The amount of robotics girls there was more than I have ever seen, which was gratifying. At the same time, if it is the same group of girls attending all the robotics competitions and engineering events, maybe it is time to spread beyond our group.

Bonus Day: November 23
WOW I just watched Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them with my mom in theaters (like any super cool sixteen year old), and I absolutely loved it. I had a ton of fun watching Mr. Scamader and  Ms. Goldstein scramble around New York trying to retrieve all the magical creatures of my childhood. On a side note, did Credence really die...?

<3 <3 <3 <3 <3!!!!!

an objective recap on the 2016 election ~if you are into that stuff~

The American people took to the polls on Tuesday, November 8, and their votes have cumulated in the election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the United States, with the conclusion of a historically tumultuous election segueing into a reconstruction of the political establishment.

Aside from voting for the next commander in chief, Americans also had to decide which candidates were to fill the empty seats in Congress. Thirty-four positions in the Senate were up for election, more than half of which were won by Republicans, giving the GOP a majority over the Democrats. Californians elected Attorney General Kamala Harris as senator, who ran on a strong platform of pro immigration and affordable college. In the other half of Congress, the House of Representatives, Republicans maintained their house majority easily, securing 239 Republican delegates to 193 Democrats (3 seats still are undecided). Democratic incumbent Jackie Speier won the position for California’s 14th Congressional District, of which San Mateo County resides.

As for the gubernatorial elections, three of the twelve participating states flipped from Democratic governors to Republican ones. Missouri, New Hampshire, and Vermont all switched from blue to red, and the current map shows the GOP controlling thirty-three of the state governorships.

While the United States government is looking decidedly Republican, the trend in local ballot measures shows states leaning left. Voters considered issues such as the legalization of marijuana, gun restrictions, health care, and the death penalty when voting on how these specific issues will be addressed in their own state. Three states, California, Massachusetts, and Nevada, voted to legalize recreational marijuana, while fours others approved it for medical purposes. Voters also decided on a range of other transformative issues, such as the approved right to self-administer life-ending medication in Colorado, a ranked voting system in Maine, and a raise in minimum wage to twelve dollars an hour in four states.

Across California, voters had to decide on seventeen propositions. The passage of Prop. 51 allocates $9 billion in bonds to construct new schools and community colleges, while approval on Prop. 52 will take the money private hospitals pay to the state for Medi-Cal matching funds. Other approved propositions range from raising taxes on tobacco products and wealthy Californians, to ensuring legislative transparency by requiring any bill being voted upon by the legislature to be present on the Internet for at least seventy-two hours. Californians failed to ban the death penalty, but successfully passed Prop. 63, which aimed to curb gun violence by requiring background checks for ammunition sales and banning the possession of large-capacity ammunition magazines. In addition, in response to the increasing diversity of California’s population, the approval of Prop. 58 reinstates multilingual education courses, which were banned by a 1998 law that required English-only classes in public schools.  

San Mateo County also had its own range of measures and seats up for election, mostly along the themes of rent stabilization, sales tax, and school district bonds. Specifically to the Bay Area, the passing of Measure RR authorizes $3.5 billion in bonds for Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) to rebuild and modernize its crowded and old transit system.

On closer inspection of California’s voter turnout by precinct and county, it is clear that the densely populated coast is the Democratic force that outweighs Republican sentiments further inland in California. Accordingly, propositions that our state passed are not all in agreement with the remaining country’s views.

Consequently, the Bay Area is a liberal bubble that often shelters Mills students from the views of the rest of America. While the presidential election outcome may have surprised and upset many, the democratic process carried out its purpose for all aspects of government and legislation and served as a wake up call for the American people.