KENTARO KAWASAKI

POLITICAL COORDINATOR

About Me: I'm an international student from Vietnam who plays loads of golf and eats loads of katsudon. I read a lot, write a lot, and panic a lot. If you're interested in J-Pop or anime, I'll always be happy to give you some recommendations :)

Hometown: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

FAMS:

• 2016-2017: SaBotaJe
• 2017-2018: VoLKano
• 2018-2019: cRescEnDo

Year at SDSU: 4

Major: Double major in Psychology and Political Science, Honors Minor in Interdisciplinary Studies

Ethnicity/Ethnicities I Identify As: Half Japanese, Half Vietnamese

Favorite APSA Memory: The last day of Knockout is always wild, and I'm extremely proud to have made it to two final rounds two semesters in a row! Running around campus like a crazy person really gets your blood flowing! Besides that, I'll always remember Banquet 2019, where we celebrated everything that we did leading up to that point. Making superlatives for each board member was crazy fun!

Favorite Music Genre: J-Pop! I'm getting in to K-Pop but I'm not quite there yet. If you're curious about J-Pop, I recommend YoiYoi Kokon by REOL, Ninja Re Bang Bang by Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, and No Title by REOL. I hope you find something you like, and if you want some more recommendations, feel free to hit me up!

Fun Fact: My left ear doesn't work properly! So if I'm turning my head mid conversation, I swear I'm not ignoring you, I'm just trying to hear you better!

Biggest Accomplishment: I don't think I have one crowning achievement that I'm super proud of! I guess I can play golf really well and I've read every book in the Monogatari Series so far! Oh, and I also won Most Knockouts at 9 knockouts, including 4 KO's in the span of two hours!

What Grinds My Gears: People that can't take responsibility for their actions and people that can't apologize. It's okay to mess up in life, but it's not okay to act like it's not your fault!

Why I Chose My Position: Well, I think that a lot of people are quite indifferent to politics because it doesn't relate to them or they find it intimidating and tiresome. I think that I can provide a new and interesting take on politics by combining it with elements of psychology to hopefully help people realize that we have way more say than we believe! With the combination of my two majors, I'd think I'll do a pretty good job!

You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

Response: Well if I have the height of a nickel, which is 2.121cm in diameter (0.835 inches), that also means that my body will be reduced in the exact same proportion. I'm 174cm tall (5'7"), so to be reduced to 2.12cm, I'd have to shrink my height 82.03 times over! 2.12 cm will still probably be enough to get hit by the blender blades, so we need to find the shortest I could possibly be! And that's when it hit me! You don't really use coins standing up so their diameter is their height- you use them lying flat on the ground! This means that they don't take up a lot of space vertically, but instead take up a lot of flat surface area! So I measured my body's depth - the total height of my body when I'm lying on the ground, and it came out to 21.59cm (8.5 inches). Since my height was reduced by 82.03 times, my depth would be reduced by the same amount, so if I were had the height of a nickel, I'd be 0.26cm (0.1 inch). So my solution? Lie down! The blades will spin right above your head! But that's assuming I live long enough to see the blades start spinning. If I'm 82.03 times shorter, according the square-cube law, that means I have 6,729 times less surface area and 551,973 less volume, so I can't even sustain my own body heat and my metabolism would skyrocket. Also, because the molecules in the air are the same size (it's not like they shrunk too), I'd be short-sighted, nearly deaf, and constantly short of breath. A small breeze would blow me away and I'd probably freeze before the blades start moving. I guess our bodies are designed to work at our own size, and scaling it down leads us to die a grizzly death.