If you pour sand onto a flat surface to form a pile, how does the impact energy of the sand determine the shape of the pile? This question has interested philosophers for ages. It has remained one of science's open problems, physics's answer to the Riemann hypothesis.

Or not. But anyway, I found it interesting, so I'm writing a paper about it for my IB extended essay. For those of you unfamiliar with IB, this is the equivalent of a senior research project.

Strange how there's no category for "Health" or "Medecine." Maybe I missed it.

...End of term exams loom. I've had a great time at Harvard Summer School. The only thing that's slightly dissapointing is how the courses get a little truncated - I guess you have to expect that when a term's worth of material gets stuffed into eight weeks.

I've finally decided which colleges I'm applying to. Out of the twelve (twelve, and only a few take the Common Application), six are really competitive "elite" schools. Assuming I've got a 30% chance at any one of these, which is a reasonable estimate, the probability that I'll be rejected by all twelve is a scant 11.7%. Of course, this assumes random admissions (not that much of a jump :) ) and no correlation between admissions decisions.

I feel like I have a responsibility to update this journal, even though absolutely nobody, including Aditi, reads it. My Google rank (still #1; I've got to put this on my college application or something) is too valuable to waste.

Apparently, this page is the number one result for "Omkar" on Google today (Aug 6 03). That's nice, considering I haven't written a damned thing in my journal.