March holidays seem so short, especially when you spend most of your time awake doing physics with a bunch of people equally or more enthusiastic about physics problems, with a trainer who is very knowledgeable and interesting.

As a group of about 11, we explored how 3 balls connected to each other would oscillate, the equation of motion of two swinging rods, how heavy a fly must be to walk from one end on a straw to the other so as not to fall off the edge of a table, and the equation of motion of a boy chasing after his girlfriend. We marveled at the expanse of Ricardo's knowledge, the elegance of the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian, and how useful complex numbers are. We groaned as we were solving problems that require l33t integration, manipulation of messy trigonometric functions (and their inverses and square roots), and numerous back substitutions. We laughed as we took many simplifying assumptions ("for simplicity, let L=m=g=1"), and abused the differential signs("d(x²+5) = 2x dx"). We've (supposedly) been through 30 hours of physics together just during this holiday. Seriously, it was rather tiring, but fun.

And among us, 3 will have to leave. The rest will spend more time together doing physics.

I must work harder!