Midterms

Hello everybody,

After another two weeks since my last blog, it's already the middle of the semester. We already had a couple tests, quizzes, exams, essays and papers, but now the midterms are coming. I will tell about some exciting things I have done in the last two weeks.

I got my first American haircut, in a real barbershop. I would say that it goes by twice as fast as it does in the Netherlands (just like dinner at almost every place around here by the way).

We had intramural football in the weekends. It was really fun to play American football with my baseball teammates. Later I also played football with my roommates. To make the game a little less aggressive we played the version called "flag football." So everyone has three little flags (lintjes) attached to their hips with velcro tape (klitterband). If a defender pulls a flag of the hips of an attacker, it counts as a tackle.

Another cool thing I didn't tell you guys yet is that almost all my roommates now know how to say "good night" in Dutch. So every time I go to bed nowadays, I say: "weltrusten", and they reply with their best version of that.

Furthermore, the paper I was talking about in my last blog has made some real progress. I have found  the formula to calculate every number of the Fibonacci sequence right away (so without having to add all the numbers, where the Fibonacci sequence is based on). This is what the formula looks like:

To make such a nice mathematical expression we use the program LaTeX. This is the code you would need to type the formula:

\begin{equation}

F_n = \frac15\sqrt{5} \cdot (\frac12 + \frac12\sqrt{5})^n - \frac15 \sqrt{5} \cdot (\frac12 - \frac12\sqrt{5})^n

\end{equation}

It seems a little difficult, but if you start handing in all your math homework in LaTeX, you will learn how to use it. (We are also strongly encouraged to google something if you don't know how it works. We are told that knowing how to google, is a really important skill for now and later.) If you're interested in the rest of my paper, let me know!

Last weekend was a nice long one, we had Monday free because it was Columbus Day. A Dutch friend of mine who is currently studying at Cornell came over to Boston. We used the long weekend to explore Boston really well. Here's a list of a couple places we went to:

• Fenway Park
• MIT
• Public Garden / Boston Common
• Freedom Trail (which is actually a great route along some of the oldest buildings of America)
• Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
• New England Aquarium

I've made a map in Google Maps with all the nice places on it. If you're interested in that, also let me know.

I hope everything is going well in the Netherlands. I'm kind of missing the "pepernoten" this time of year ;)

All the best,

Bram