Alexis Alcazar

In her message, a Japanese tutor told me that she went to see fireworks in Kamakura and asked if I had ever seen fireworks in Japan. I handwrote my reply in Japanese to say that I have not yet done so and that I want to experience them someday. While writing, I learned that the Japanese word for fireworks is   花火    (はなび • hanabi) . Broken down,   花   means "flower" and   火  means "fire".   花火   is literally "flower fire". The Japanese see fireworks as flowers in the form of fire, and I find that deeply poetic. I had never thought of fireworks that way before, and learning this has changed the way I see them forever. In my eyes, they are no longer just bright, colorful explosions in the night sky. Fireworks are flowers made of fire. Violent and yet ever so delicate, their ethereal beauty makes them seem almost otherworldly. Perhaps that is why they bloom for only a few fleeting seconds.

 A year ago, I took a math exam for a job application. I passed the exam, made it to the interviews, and actually got qualified for the training. Eventually, I decided not to take that opportunity, and I chose to pursue the job that I have right now. But this article is not about that missed job or any jobs. This is about a particular math problem in the math exam. It was so interesting that I told myself I would write about it. And after 1 year, here it is. The problem went like this: It is 2:00. At what time will the hour hand and the minute hand form a straight line? Before this exam, I had never solved a problem like this. I had no idea where to begin (let alone solve it). I could skip this problem and not give a fuck about this 1 point. But I did not. I wanted to solve it not for the point, but for the sake of solving it. I wanted to prove to myself that my knack for geometry from high school was still sitting behind my brain, awaiting to be tapped. I so began thinking. The fi...

 I woke up early in the morning and sat at my computer. I was about to study Japanese when I suddenly remembered how I made a perfect star in high school. At that time, I had a good grasp of elementary geometry, so I was able to easily make it with a ruler and a protractor. With a ruler to measure length and a protractor to measure angles, it was easy to make a star.  A star is a polygon with ten sides. Technically, it is a decagon. But a star can be created by laying out only five lines from its center as its frame. To make a perfect star, all five lines must have the same length and must have equal angles between them. A complete rotation has 360°. To determine the angle from one line to the other, 360° is divided by the number of lines, which is 5. 360° / 5 = 72° From the angle alone, and with a ruler and a protractor, a perfect star can be drawn like so: Draw a line with length x from the center upward. Then, measure 72° from the center to its left and right, and draw the...

 I still remember when I was in my first year studying electrical engineering at the university, I was working on building a simple circuit from the little knowledge that I had at that time, using the basic components such as resistors, switches, batteries, and lamps. Along the process of my circuit building, I thought to myself, wouldn't it be nice if there were a component that lets current pass in one direction and blocks it from the other? At that time, I thought I was being a smart kid who just posed a very clever question that could change engineering forever. And at that very moment, my naiveté was instantly shattered when I found out about the existence of diodes. It exists . The 'magical' component that I wanted in order to realize the outcome for my circuit actually existed, not to mention it being invented more than a century before I came into being. I was completely awestruck, and I was filled with excitement at the same time. I kept asking, how does this '...