The Abacus #11

The AbacusEdition No.11

By Varun

A recent meta-study by the Abacus Research Unit has revealed that most of the current popular revision strategies are in fact terrible, and nine out of every zero students in the immense sample have proven so. Instead, we suggest that you try out some of these fresh, new techniques that have shown to aid students with A Levels. No, really, please look.

- List the activities that you must do this week and their durations (false‐ly assuming that they are inite). Create an activity-on-arc diagram, perform a forward and backward pass. Calculate the loat for each ac‐tivity; if there is any at all, you're do‐ing everything wrong.

- Label the tension in the string in‐side your brain's pulley system, T. At each end, replace T with coffee in order to help you with late night re‐vision, thus further depriving your‐self of the sleep that you deinitely do not need.

- Convert all your summarised notes into ASCII code, then translate into hexadecimal to allow for concise, readable revision (and for a chal‐lenge, attempt Unicode).

KCLMS students were let disap‐pointed last week ater they turned up early to to school in order to wit‐ness the darkest solar eclipse to grace the British Isles in 16 years. In true British style, they were let dis‐appointed by the weather, as clouds obscured the spectacle. he only in‐dicator of the event was a slight dimming of the already feeble day‐light, akin to the dimming effect that occurs when a teacher leans against the light switch in the middle of As‐sembly.

Twitter activists rushed to blame the

poor show on austerity cuts to the arts budget imposed by the Coali‐tion government. @MrMcAngry tweeted 'Govt should be ashamed of itself. hey think they can cut even the darkness and we won't notice.' But the Abacus' consulting As‐tronomer had an alternative expla‐nation: "What did you think those bases on the Moon were for? Eye t o l d y o u h e y w e r e u p t o something." She said this before donning a foil hat and camoulage paint, then running out of our office. It looks like we've been cheated out of an eclipse.

Total Eclipse Of he Chart?

he Deinitive Guide To Revising

2 he Abacus

- Draw a perfect circle of centre 'What even' and radius 'Nope'. Panic as you see your work go round and round with no end.

- Call for help. Scream. hen record these painful shrieks on Audacity and ind the frequency and ampli‐tude of the tortured sound waves. In order to avoid aliasing, use a sam‐

pling rate two times as high as the highest frequency of the waves when converting to digital. Take these waveforms to 'clinics' ater school, where a teacher will attend to your baffled mumbles.

- You are told to do at least four hours of study per day. Being the common teenager, you decide that there must be at least eight hours of procrastination and the total time spent sleeping is more than three hours. By letting x = hours spent working and y = hours spent pro‐crastinating, represent this informa‐tion as inequalities and plot them on a graph to ind the strategy that will give you the least work time, most procrastination time, and the least sleep.

- Consider the matrix M, which rep‐resents your struggles, and the coor‐dinates U, which is you at this cur‐rent time. Work out the transforma‐tion applied to U, and use the deter‐minant to determine the scale factor by which you will be stretched and eventually snap. Hence, work out the average tensile strength of an A Level student (provide correct units).

- Read, do, re-read (as Mr. Abram‐

son advises), panic, sweat, cry, then do the thing anyways without the hope of getting a mark (I call this RDRRPSCTDTTAWTHOGAM or RDRRPSCDTAWHGM for short). Catchy mnemonics such as these help with learning too.

As mentioned before, an ininite percentage of students have beneit‐ed from the Abacus Research Unit's Revision Strategies and Tips, so we hope that you do not let yourselves down by neglecting this useful piece of information. Good luck!

by HJ

1. Mr Robson will create a new hy‐brid of ire breathing pigs/lying cats which will be planning a revolution right under our noses. When pigs ly, you say? hey already do.

2. Relationships at KCLMS will take a very large turn for the better or for the worst. Will friendship buckle in spring or blossom with the lowers?

3. KCLMS students will go into ultra-power saving mode in prepa‐ration for the AS exams coming up. Late night revision (or more accu‐rately countless hours or procrasti‐nation), high caffeine energy drinks and a very zombie looking crazy eyes. Be prepared because the fore‐cast is not looking good.

4. here will be a dense air of stress around the main building of KCLMS as the pressure rises for all. Travelling around may be difficult depending on the number of stu‐dents around at any given area.

5. he microwave phase will follow the same fate as the sandwich man and students will go back to buying non microwaved food. Sad times Mr Microwave because your time will come to an end.

1. Who dreamt up oyster lavour crisps? And how did they manage to sell them to KCL's catering department?

2. Why is it difficult to answer the question 'how long is a piece of string?'?

3. Why do past exam papers nev‐er have questions about talkative pigs, or communica‐tive animals of any kind for that matter?

4. As a multiple of the 3 minute guideline, what was the aver‐age length of the EPQ mini-presentations?

5. What was the average number of hours students let to com‐

plete their Research Reviews?6. Why do our timetables have

decreasing relevance to what we actually end up doing?

7. Who's been making pretty pat‐terns with the magnets on the Student Council noticeboard?

8. If the Internet works by send‐ing packets of data, would buying multipacks speed it up?

9. What is the total weight, in kg, of prospectuses, pens, toys and sweets collected by KCLMS students at the UCAS conven‐tion?

10. What persuaded the powers that be to provide one token line of Pepsi bottles in the vending machines, standing, like soldiers, against a legion of Coca Cola bottles and cans?

5 hings hat Will Happen at KCLMS

in Spring

10 hings We Want To Know

3he Abacus

by Jack Darrant

If you followed our advice in Abacii passim about UCAS applications, you will by now be coming to the end of your dream undergraduate degree at a prestigious university and be wondering to do with that daunting blank, debt-saddled can‐vass that is your life until you can af‐ford to skive off and retire. Never fear, this article will explain how you can sell yourself into wage slavery for the next half a century!

he CV. his document, just a few hundred words, is your sole means of advertising yourself to potential employers. It has to be special. hey see dozens of boring, word-pro‐cessed CVs every day, so make yours stand out. If possible, write yours in crayon on an A3 sheet of paper, or the back of the Daily Star. Add illus‐trations of key moments from your life, such as that time you played a lamp-post in the school play. Also, be original with what you write about, everyone else puts their qual‐iications, work experience and sim‐

ilar so avoid that at all costs. Get down to the real business: explain how you take your tea, how oten you nap at your desk, who your favourite Hunger Games character is, etc, etc. Lastly, everybody else sends CVs by boring old Royal Mail or email, so again, avoid at all costs. Instead, why not break in to the ap‐propriate Human Resources depart‐ment and frisbee it to the most se‐nior person in the room? Failing that, why not send it with a kisso‐gram? Employers will be so im‐

pressed by your initiative, you'll have an interview in no time!

he interview. Employers are look‐ing for responsible workers, so ev‐erything you do should relect that. Wear that £5 onsie you found in Pri‐mark and your interviewer will see that you are careful with money. Similarly, bring some bottles and plastic bags so that, if you are of‐fered tea and biscuits, you can take some home, showing you are well prepared and thrity!

It is vital that you can show you are relaxed, so you might want to bring a bottle of beer and a board game into the interview with you- but make sure you offer to share, as that shows you are a team player. Also, if you are asked any questions you should either respond with gossip about Kim Kardashian's hair (thus showing you are knowledgeable about current affairs) or by frowning, nodding and slowly re‐peating the question back to the in‐terviewee (displaying your empathy skills).

Above all, you must be modest to distinguish yourself from the arro‐gant and self-promoting rival candi‐dates. For example, play down your skills, qualities ('My best quality? Well, at least I'm aware what a mean and talentless idiot I am...') and qualiications ('I have 10 GCSEs, but one of them was a B so doesn't really count.'). If you had a chance to meet other candidates, you can really im‐

press the interviewer by writing a short essay about why they would be better at the job than you.

Lastly, make sure that you leave your employer in no doubt as to what your favourite colour is.

by Edd Bahls

It's that time of year again: daffodils are springing up in the supermar‐kets, you can travel to school in the daylight again... Yes, it's Spring, and that can only mean one thing: the Budget. Every year the Chancellor shows up with a red lunchbox and reads out what he (or she- but we've never had a female chancellor to date) has leaked to the press about his plans for taxes and government spending.

his Budget was supposed to be par‐ticularly interesting, as Chancellors of all political parties always try to use pre-election Budgets to win popularity by dishing out tax cuts or eye-catching spending plans. George Osborne couldn't afford many of these this time, as he was trying to leave the budget deicit- the amount the government borrows when it doesn't raise enough tax to inance its spending- as low as possible.

In fact, Osborne was desperately trying to pretend he had met his tar‐get to have the national debt (the ac‐cumulated debt from budget deicits run by past governments) falling by 2015. In order to do that, he plans to sell off things. Imagine having no money and no job. hen you sell the electronics and the furniture in your house to buy food. Finally, you con‐clude that, as you are not getting into debt, your lifestyle must be sus‐tainable. hat is what George Os‐borne is doing, but the food is the NHS and the furniture is banks and

he Abacus Guide to Getting A Job

he Budget: Crunching

he Numbers

4 he Abacus

railways.

he government owns 25% of Lloyds Bank (which includes Halifax) as a legacy of the bailouts of the Great Recession in 2008. In or‐der to rescue failing banks, the gov‐ernment agreed to buy shares in them at the price they would be if the banks were not failing. hen, if more money was needed, we would lend money to the banks that we now owned. Eventually, when the banks were back on their feet, us taxpayers could recover our money b y s e l l i n g o u r m a s s i v e shareholdings. Maybe. At some dis‐tant point in the future. Sounds like a fair deal, right? Mind you, it was probably better than the chaos that ensues when you let banks collapse. So addicted did the banks become to this support that the government became the proud new owner of all of Northern Rock, bits of Bradford and Bingley, 43% of Lloyds and 85% of RBS/NatWest.

George Osborne has sold some of these, together with Royal Mail, East Coast railways, the Tote betting shops and our share in the HS1 rail link, oten for less than they are worth, in order to make the national debt igures look a bit better than they otherwise would be. And to be fair, if the national debt had in‐creased from £1 trillion to £1.5 tril‐lion on your watch, wouldn't you do the same?

To be fair to Mr Osborne, he did an‐nounce some popular polices, like cutting the tax on a pint of beer by 1p and extending the 'Help to Buy' scheme. In effect, the government will give irst-time homebuyers up to £3000 towards their irst home, but only if they save up slowly enough, can stand on one leg and apply during the Autumn equinox of 2024.

by HJ

An award winning ilm about Stephen Hawking, it documents his life from 1963 to the 1990s, based on the autobiography by Jane Wilde Hawking (Travelling to Ininity: My Life with Stephen". Over two decades of Stephen and Jane Hawk‐ing's life compressed into two hours of brilliance. Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones completely and utterly nailed it. he acting, script work, cinematography and soundtrack were top notch and the accolades certainly showed it. Winning 1 Os‐car and 23 other various awards (af‐ter 86 nominations), this ilm was highly praised. Hawking himself has seen the ilm and remarked how ac‐curate the ilm was in representing his life and the difficulties of raising three children. However, he heory of Everything has its rival, he Imi‐tation Game (which was mentioned in one of the past issues of the Aba‐cus).

So which is better? Both ilms are very good at portraying two real life biopic geniuses by two remarkable actors. he heory of Everything takes the audience through Stephen Hawking's personal life more so than he Imitation Game does with Alan Turing's life. Both interpreta‐tions I found were very accurate to real life events that happened and they were both astoundingly moving and breath-taking.

IMDb gave he heory of Every‐thing a 7.8 out of 10 whereas he Imitation Game received an 8.2 out of 10 (on top of being #199 out of

the top 250 and winning 1 Oscar, 45 other wins and 105 nominations). If we were looking at this from a statis‐tic point of view, it is clear who has won.Yet I still believe that he heo‐ry of Everything still has a ighting

chance, the score written by Johan Johannsson is far more superior to the score for he Imitation Game in a musical sense. Nonetheless, he Imitation Game has a very good repertoire of music for its own ilm.

he irony of the battle between these outstanding ilms is that 10 years ago, Hawking was made. he star of the rival ilm to he heory of Ev‐erything was the irst to play Stephen Hawking in 2004 in a TV movie by the BBC. Yes, Benedict Cumberbatch did play Stephen Hawking. To be completely honest, he heory of Everything is better than Hawking, being a Hollywood standard ilm with a good budget,a longer time frame a nd a marvellous soundtrack. But that does not neces‐sarily mean that he heory of Ev‐erything beats he Imitation Game. Cumberbatch's performance has grown over the decade and he plays Turing very well. To conclude, I am unable to make a judgement on which is better. I'm afraid I'll have to leave this with all of you to decide.

Film Focus: Hawking versus Turing

5he Abacus

Credit: Finnbar and Varun

1. Take over the world

a. Step 1: Plan to take over the world.

b. Step 2: Draw a limited number of Illuminati symbols because the whiteboard is too small to it an ini‐nite number of Illuminati symbols (Hammers and sickles are good too! Ed.).

c. Step 3: Rub out the Illuminati symbols because you realise that you have no space to plan your domina‐tion over the world.

d. Step 4: Get annoyed at the pen rubbings all over your table/bed/loor depending on your current lo‐cation.

e. Step 5: Actually think of a plan to take over the world.

f. Step 6: Put the plan onto the whiteboard, using both sides of the board.

g. Step 7: Realise that your writing has been too big and half your plan is smudged.

h. Step 8: Rub it all out. Get annoyed. Start over.

i. Step 9: Get distracted and start doodling or playing Tic Tac Toe with Bob (the lying cat with cool sunglasses).

j. Step 10: Finish plan to take over world ater three decades and a Mas‐ter's degree in procrastination.

k. Step 11: Implement your plan af‐

ter more procrastination.

l. Step 12: Worship your whiteboard.

2. Draw lots of diagrams depicting your triumph over one of Mr Rob‐son's ire breathing pigs.

3. Use your whiteboard as a rain shield for the time where you acci‐dently set off the sprinklers at Google HQ.

4. Use your whiteboard as a shield as you pretend to be Captain America.

5. Pretend you're a teacher and you're nearly as cool as Mr Robson.

6. Write a disposable bucket list.

7. Design a cool outit for one of Mr Robson's ire breathing pig/ lying cat hybrid.

8. Lead a revolution (From your bed? Because you said the brains I

had went to my head? Will anybody understand this reference? Ed.).

9. Pretend you're a journalist and in‐terview random strangers about their favourite ire breathing pig.

10. Frisbee.

10 Alternative Uses For Your Mini Whiteboard

6 he Abacus

by Jack Darrant

he Student Council has invited students to submit their designs for a school logo that will feature on, amongst other things, the KCLMS-branded hoodies that it hopes to sell later in the year. he lucky winner will recieve the gratitude of a brand-equipped school and the kudos (that's with a small 'k'!) of having their design used. Moreover, the Il‐luminati are understood to look favourably on any design that incor‐porates the Eye of Providence or an allusion thereto, though this of course depends on how many mem‐

bers of the selection panel are a part of the New World Order.

Few speciic guidelines or require‐ments exist for the logos to be sub‐mitted; it is hoped that this will en‐courage entrants to be creative with their designs.

Given the formidable artistic talent that exists in the school, the selec‐tion panel (comprised of Council members) anticipates having to make difficult decisions when choosing a winner.

Any queries should be directed to the competition administrator, Chair of the Council, Oscar.

MCO

1. he difficulty of an FP1 paper in a given year is equivalent to h times the square of the diffi‐

culty of the C1 paper in that year. By taking logarithms of some things and plotting them against some other things, ind h.

2. An invariant line is an opinion somebody will express regard‐less of any contradictory facts that are presented to them. By applying the rotation matrix for a 45 degree anti-clockwise turn to a politician, ind TWO invariant lines s/he has.

MSD

1. Because I live in the Dark Ages, I still use an FM radio. I am trying to listen to Radio 4, but some idiot is jamming the signal with a pirate radio sta‐tion. In desperation, I turn the dial to the other frequency I can catch PM on. Plot a cumu‐lative frequency graph for this tragic little situation.

2. Finally, I decide to drag myself into the modern world. In or‐der to buy a digital radio, I need to buy the local paper (15 minutes), scan the classiied adverts (5 minutes), stop to look at the property section and curse modern house prices (1 hour), fax anybody who's selling a radio (10 min‐utes), haggle (5 minutes), come to collect it (30 minutes) then write a cheque with a quill (17 minutes). Draw an

activity arc network thingy for these tasks.

MME

1. On page 94 you will ind a dia‐gram of the framework of pil‐lars and rods which holds up the Millenium Dome, sorry, O2 Belieber Palace, assuming that the world has a stroke of good luck and, at his next con‐cert, a pillar collapses and de‐stroys Beiber's limousine in the car park outside, calculate the tension in the 7 neighbour‐ing pillars.

2. You can now model the path of a projectile, apply Newton's laws and the constant accelera‐tion formulae to set-ups fea‐turing lits, pulleys and vehi‐cles. You can use knowledge about impulses and momen‐tum and apply it to collisions between rolling balls. Given that the coefficient of friction is 0.44, and remembering to draw a diagram, explain whether it was worth acquir‐ing this knowledge, or if the time would have been better spent slacking in McDonald's

Student Council

Launches Logo

Competition

The Revision Guide

7he Abacus

Magic Number

Stooges

Little Pigs

French Hens

Bronte

Human Ear

Suit

Triangle

Macbeth Witches

Cerberus' Heads

Blind Mice

Wise Men

Holy Trinity

Destiny's Child

Freud's heory of Personality

Beetlejuice

Human Species

Foster the People

People- he Gettysburg Address

he Fates

Rock, Paper, Scissors

Ale

Aid

Add

Ask

Bat

Bet

Bad

Cat

Cat

Cat

Cat

Fig

Cat

instead.

COM

1. An IP address consists of 4 bytes and is the (supposedly) u n i qu e l o c at i on of any Internet-connected computer in the world. An MP address is a house that taxpayers have funded using parliamentary expenses. Using Python, write a communication protocol that allows any MP to communi‐cate with any Internet host for the purpose of sending unwise Tweets.

2. he Internet is so designed that hosts communicate by sending packets to each other. What comminication protocol should I use to get another host to send me packets of Doritos?

PHY

1. Why are there more public Physics lectures in London than, it would seem, all other subjects combined? Are Physi‐cists particularly keen to share their knowledge? Explain, with reference to the frequency of communications that are con‐ducted.

2. A 6V battery is connected in series with 5 lightbulbs. Con‐nected accross one of the light‐bulbs is a potentiometer in parallel with a series of paral‐lell circuits consisting of ther‐mistors, 1.5V cells, voltmeters, multimeter and a shower of electrically charged water puz‐zles. What is the charge carried by the circuit when current reaches fourth lightbulb of the third circuit. Use some law or the other to help you.

Clue 1

Sapere AudeMisc. Clue

8 he Abacus

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Clue 2 (Left)

Clue 3