Spring in Ithaca

Looks like spring is making its way to Ithaca:

Except, not really.

Top picture was taken a few weeks ago.  If you can't tell, the tree is budding, the grass is visible, and the sky is blue.  Bottom picture was taken on the way to class Thursday (yesterday) morning.  The grass, trees, and buildings appear to have been covered by a soft, wet white substance also known as snow.  Everything is grey.

Double Knots

I’m actually talking about two different kinds of knots here.  Two types of double knots . . . hidden symbolism? . . . Yeah, no.

First, I would like to discuss the art of tying shoelaces.  I tie my shoelaces when I first put my shoes on, but as soon as they become untied, I have a habit of leaving them that way.  This actually disturbs other people, especially the ones who trip over my shoelaces, more than me.  However, when I started climbing, I had to double knot the laces on my climbing shoes because those were getting in my way when they came untied every five minutes.  This led me to the brilliant idea to also double knot my regular shoes.

Yeah, I know.  It took me nineteen years several months to realize that I could double knot my shoelaces and they wouldn't come untied.

Speaking of climbing, (That may have just been a transition, meaning that I may have actually learned something from fourteen years of English class.) there are several knots necessary for climbers to know.  Among those are the double fisherman’s and double figure eight knots.

I had to learn the double fisherman’s my sophomore year of high school when we had to tie our own harnesses.  The double figure eight I had to learn a few weeks ago; it’s the knot we use to tie climbers in to the ropes at Lindseth.  I think I have some sort of learning-to-tie-knots deficiency, because while everyone else is tying knots after one demonstration, I’m staring at two ends of rope in my hands.

I’m not sure if it’s because I want to tie the knots in the opposite direction as the way they’re taught or what, but as soon as anyone starts saying anything like “and take the two ends of the rope and wrap one end around the other, then pull the other end through the loop and bring the ends of the rope back together and you’re done,” I get hopelessly lost after about the “and.”  The first one.  So for me, learning to tie any type of knot more complicated than my shoelaces* involves someone walking me through every single step.  Probably multiple times.  But I can now tie a double figure eight knot, and yes, I am very close to passing my belay test.

*Actually, there’s the “around the tree” method of tying shoelaces, which I don’t use, and no matter how many times I see people do it/have it explained to me, I will not be learning to tie this on my own. And no, an online picture tutorial will not help me. Have you ever tried to draw a knot?

You Win Some, You Lose Some

After a fairly successful weekend on the sports front, Cornell and the New England Revolution proceeded to then lose just enough games to disappoint their fans.  On Saturday, the Revolution had an early evening kickoff against the Philadelphia Union.  I was listening on the radio (Which, by the way, is especially confusing when Dax McCarty [New York Red Bulls] and Stephen McCarthy [Revolution] are playing against each other.  Is it too much to ask to know which team has the ball?) and from what I could tell, it wasn't a particularly good game.

There were approximately three shots in the first half and the teams went into the second half tied.  With about twenty minutes left to play, the Union scored on a terribly marked set piece.  To add insult to injury, the goalscorer had scored the game winning goal against the Revolution during the previous three Union-Revolution games.

With that, the Revolution returns home to play Sporting Kansas City.  In the offseason, New England’s highest paid midfielder Benny Feilhaber was sent to Sporting KC for allocation money and draft picks.  People weren't exactly devastated to see him go, but if this plays out in typical New England fashion, I expect a hat trick from him this afternoon.  (See also Jeff Larentowicz’s MLS Cup with the Colorado Rapids the year after he was traded and Shalrie Joseph’s two-goal performance against New England last summer.  Note: those were the only two goals Joseph scored for Chivas USA in twelve games.  And since the Revolution didn't want to hold on to Marko Perovic, fortunately he went back to Europe.  But seriously, can we get this guy back?)

On the same day as the Revolution’s loss, the Cornell’s women’s hockey team was knocked out of the NCAA playoffs and the men lost to Quinnipiac 10-0.  Really.  While the women’s hockey season was ended, the men had one more chance to keep their playoff hopes alive.  With a best of three series tied at one game each, Quinnipiac and Cornell would face off one more time on Sunday night.

Cornell  lost.  In double overtime.

Final note: I would be more than happy to be proven wrong about Feilhaber’s return to New England, especially if the Revolution pull off a win.

If At First You Don't Succeed

Try, try again; you’ll probably fall again, but try not to hurt yourself.  More life lessons from the climbing wall.  I know, I’m my parents are paying thousands of dollars [for me] to go to Cornell and I seem to be learning the most from my PE class.  This only looks like the case because somehow, I don’t think the general population would find nested for-loops and inhomogeneous linear higher order ordinary differential equations as fascinating as I do, so I keep that fun to myself.

In rock climbing two Mondays ago, instead of learning a few new climbing techniques like we usually do after snack, we were put into groups and told to come up with our own bouldering problem.  We were told that the other groups would be trying our problem, so the goal was to find something kind of absurd, but that we could still climb.  As in, no choosing handholds fifteen feet apart because that’s just ridiculous.

The instructor who was with our group mostly came up with our route, but then two out of the three of us had to climb it.  One of the guys in my group was pretty tall, so he did it after a couple tries.  I, on the other hand, occasionally have trouble getting off the ground because I can’t reach any handholds.

The route began with some solid hand and footholds.  The next move was to move my right hand into a pocket-type hold (I know, I've got the terminology down solid.) and switch feet so that my left foot was free.  At that point, there was some mantling (pushing down on a hold instead of pulling up or to the side) and smearing (using the friction between the wall and your shoe), and that’s where I kept getting stuck.  With both hands jammed into a hold, I was supposed to pull myself up to reach the second to last handhold, but I kept slipping out.

What the instructors have been teaching us in class is that where you put your feet is as important as where you put your hands, and shifting your weight can drastically affect your balance.  I didn't really have a choice about where my feet were, but by shifting my weight onto my left leg, I could push myself upward, move my left hand to the next hold, and finish the route.

It took me almost ten tries, but I did it. And now I have a route on the climbing wall, which I think is pretty cool.

Let’s Go Red, and Viva the Revolution

It seems that all my favorite sports teams had a pretty good weekend a couple weeks ago*. At Cornell, women’s hockey beat Harvard to win the ECAC Hockey championship.  Men’s hockey beat Princeton in a best of three series to move on to the ECAC quarterfinals.  Women’s basketball picked up a win against Dartmouth.  Over in Bridgeview, Illinois, the New England Revolution started their MLS season with an away win against the Chicago Fire.

It started Friday night with women’s basketball, but I was working and couldn't attend the game.  On Saturday, Lynah [Cornell's rink] was scheduled to host any and all of the ECAC action, so the first game (Cornell vs. St. Lawrence) started early, at one.  (If the men had gotten home ice for their first round games, the early start would have allowed games to be played at one, four, and seven – both women’s semifinal games followed by the men’s game.)

The women continued the trend of not jumping out to a 4-0 lead (like they sometimes did in the regular season) in the playoffs.  They scored two goals in the first period, but were matched by St. Lawrence in the second period, so we went into the third period tied.  Midway through the third period, Cornell got called for two penalties, leaving the team to play some 3 on 5 hockey and me, and the band, and probably a lot of Lynah, to think “we’re in trouble.”  But the team managed to kill the first penalty, and with less than two minutes to go, scored the winning goal.

After the game, since it was still early, I had a couple hours in the afternoon to do nothing get caught up on homework.  Later that night, I may have been simultaneously checking the score to the men’s second game against Princeton, watching the live comment feed of the Revolution vs. Fire game, and trying to Skype with my parents.  Turns out the Cornell men’s hockey team secured their second win to move on in the playoffs, and not only did the Revolution’s Jerry Bengtson score a goal, but the Revolution held on to their late lead to secure the win.  (Bengtson is fairly well known around MLS circles for scoring Honduras’ game-winning goal in the US-Honduras World Cup Qualifying match while also being seemingly unable to score for the Revolution.  Let’s hope he proves otherwise.)

Sunday, the women’s hockey team took on Harvard for the ECAC final.  It was similar to the St. Lawrence game, except with less goals.  Cornell scored first, then Harvard tied the game in the first period; nobody scored in the second, and we were down to the last minutes of the third period.  Once again, Cornell scored their game-winning goal with less than two minutes to play.  They almost made it 3-1 with an open net goal, but the puck hit the post and didn’t end up crossing the line.  And with that, the women move on the NCAA playoffs, the men take on Quinnipiac in the ECAC quarterfinals, and there may yet be hope for the Revolution.

(For anyone who doesn't understand why the title seems to be applauding a color and making marginally correct English sentences like “Live the Revolution”:  Cornell teams are often referred to as the Big Red, and fans often shout “Let’s go red” to cheer them on.  Last year, the Revolution’s home goal song was “Viva the Revolution.”)

*Blog time tends to move anywhere from a few days to a couple weeks behind real time. Since that weekend, a few somewhat demoralizing events have transpired; they will probably be featured sometime within the next weeks.

Pi Day

Pi day was . . . last Thursday. I had raspberry pie to celebrate. I also spent two and a half hours at RPCC for dinner, but that’s another story.

If you don’t know me or haven’t been reading my blog, you might not know that I like math. Unfortunately, I don’t have any math planned for today. Fortunately (or also unfortunately), I can just make it up as I go.

So, here goes. The closest fractional approximation for pi with both numerator and denominator under one hundred is 22/7. This comes out to be 3.142857, repeating all six decimal places. Sometime in middle school, I learned that every fraction can be written as a terminating or repeating decimal. Conversely, any repeating decimal can be written as a fraction (being able to write terminating decimals as fractions is fairly obvious).

Since then, I have probably gotten way too much amusement dividing fractions out mentally until they repeat. My personal favorite is 1/7, which happens to be the fractional leftovers of 22/7. Which brings us back to pi day.

Well, pi sounds like pie, which is like cake, which leads me to another fun mathematical problem. Suppose you have a square cake with icing on its top and all four sides. Suppose you also have ten friends who all want slices of cake with not only an equal amount of cake but also an equal amount of icing. Suppose any leftover cake will be smashed into your hair by angry friends who are mad that they didn't get more cake (this will also happen in the case of unequal slices). One cake, eleven people – how do you slice this cake to avoid washing dessert out of your hair?

It turns out that by dividing the perimeter of the cake by the number of slices you need, marking out these divisions on the cake perimeter, and cutting from each mark to the center, every slice will have the same amount of cake and icing. Seen from the top, each slice can be thought of as a triangle (or two triangles, for pieces spanning the corners). All the slices have the same height, as well as the same base (sum of the two bases for corners), since the bases are equal portions of the perimeter.

Therefore, since the area of a triangle is half of the base times the height, every person gets the same amount of cake and icing. Other solutions include buying a circular cake (you’d naturally divide a circular cake in exactly the same method as described above, but for some reason people like cutting square cakes into square/rectangular pieces), tossing the cake into a blender and distributing portions by weight, or getting rid of three friends (cutting eight equal pieces is a lot more intuitive than cutting eleven equal pieces).

I read about the solution (the first one) to the cake problem in the book Why Do Buses Come in Threes? (if you couldn't tell, the last three solutions are mine). This is one of my favorite books, and it discusses how math is involved in everyday life. Yes, I read books about math in my free time.  Credit to the authors for compiling the mathematical solution, but also feel free to use any of mine.

Just Keep Coiling, Just Keep Coiling

When I got back to Cornell for spring semester I figured that since I wouldn't be writing fifteen page lab reports or analyzing phase diagrams for hours on end I should get a job.  With my extensive work experiences (i.e. none) I set out to find a job that I would enjoy but that would still employ me.  To make a not-very-long story shorter, I was hired by Cornell Productions.  After going through all the paperwork, I finally worked my first shift last Friday.

I was given the prestigious position of stagehand.  For the first part of the night, I sat backstage and listened to jazz for two hours.  In middle school, I joined the jazz band, but the market for jazz clarinet is about the size as the market for electric pickle lights.  Which is to say, just about zero.  Since then, I have played very little jazz and don’t listen to it much either.  That said, the concert was pretty good.

It’s a different experience, hearing a concert from backstage.  It’s both louder because of how close you are and harder to hear because everything’s set up to project sound out toward the audience.  But I wasn’t getting paid to sit around and listen to jazz; my actual job was to be ready if the Bailey Hall staff needed anything in the case of any sort of disaster.  Fortunately, they didn’t, and after the show was when my real work began.

Once the audience left, the other stagehand and I, plus the sound technicians, got to work.  For whatever reason, the jazz band that had just performed needed something like twenty microphones for their ten member group.  For every single one, we had to take the microphone off the stand, untangle the stand from the sea of wires covering the stage, and then collapse the stand.  After that, we got to coil the sea of wire spaghetti.  Because, you know, mikes don’t work if they’re not plugged in.  (Yes, I am aware that wireless mikes exist . . . didn’t use any of those on Friday.)

And these weren’t wires like wires for your laptop charger or to plug in your kitchen blender.  These were giant fat wires (because a larger cross section means a lower resistivity and a lower chance of a stage covering in burning wires), and some of them stretched out across the entire stage.  Let’s just say that coil wrangling should be a new Olympic sport or something like that.

Once the stage was cleared off, we stored everything where it was supposed to go, and that ended my first work experience at Cornell (or anywhere, really).  I have to say that I really liked working backstage, and I actually don’t mind coiling, no matter what it sounds like earlier in my post.  So, yeah, I like my job.

161 Things Every Cornellian Should Do, #115

#115. See how long you can avoid accepting a quartercard on Ho Plaza

I don’t know what it’s like at other colleges, but at Cornell, quartercarding, or handing out quarter sheets of paper to promote a cause or club, is a common occurrence, especially in the warmer months.  However, even more prevalent are the swarms of people trying to avoid getting a quartercard while innocently walking to class.

I think it’s been a few months since I got a quartercard on the plaza, but I did recently have one shoved into my face handed to me on the Thurston Avenue bridge.  Normally, I don’t mind getting them, but I do know some methods to lessen the chances of having to take yet another quartercard advertising a concert by a group nobody’s ever heard of in some hole in the ground café on campus, mostly likely at a weird time like Wednesday afternoon.

Method 1: Stare intently at the ground with your hands shoved in your pockets.  Especially effective if you’re wearing a hat, your hood is pulled way forward, or both.  (My brother says it makes me look like a duck.  No comment.)  This ensures that there’s no way to make eye contact and you may be ignored in favor of less suspecting targets.

Method 2: Follow a large group.  Quartercarders will target the people at the front of the group and/or those who express the most interest.  By walking directly behind a group, it appears that you are part of the group and so have at least heard about the cause or event, even if you haven’t had a quartercard shoved in your hand.

Method 3: Sprint.  Simple mathematics here.  At greater velocities, delta t for a given delta x is smaller.  Therefore, quartercarders have less time to spot you, approach you, tell you what their event is, and hand you the quartercard.  In addition, a greater velocity means that you have a greater momentum, and a larger impulse must be applied to stop you in order for the quartercarder to have enough time to do everything in the preceding sentence.  Hopefully, this impulse will be above the impulse threshold (a function of enthusiasm, desire to promote the event, and desperation) of the quartercarder and you will be left alone.

Method 4: Go ninja.  Method of choice for times when there are no large groups to follow, but there are still a fair number of people walking around.  Sometimes works on the Thurston Avenue bridge.  In this method, you wait until the quartercarder is either occupied with other people or facing the opposite direction.  As soon as this happens, walk behind their back as silently as possible.

Band Sightings

(Or more accurately, band hearings, but anyway  . . .)  It’s always funny how you start noticing things once they've been brought to your attention.  Take, for example, the fact that we recently reintroduced the song “Let it Whip” in pep band.  A week or so afterward, I was at RPCC buying milk (and probably cereal).  As I was leaving, I noticed the music they had playing and thought, “This sounds familiar.”  It was “Let it Whip.”

Then a couple Sundays ago after church, I was at the climbing wall with a friend.  While I was working on traversing the wall, I stopped for a moment and realized that I knew the song that was playing (the  staff at the climbing wall usually have someone’s music device playing).  This was particularly exciting because I don’t listen to much music with words.  Anyway, the song was “Are you Gonna be my Girl?” another piece from our pep band folder.

And then last Friday I was working at Bailey Hall (more to come on that) and before the show they had music playing to entertain anyone who decided to show up early.  Most of it was jazz that all sounded alike I didn’t recognize, but I’m almost certain one of the pieces was “Sandunga,” except more jazzy than the pep band plays it.

The last band sighting has to do with MATLAB.  Our MATLAB professor likes to emphasize graphics, even in beginning programming, so by now we know how to set up figure windows.  It goes as follows:

close all       % Closes previous windows

figure          % Opens a new figure window

axis equal off  % Sets x- and y-axes equal, turns axes off

hold on         % Keeps next plot commands in same figure window

What I really want to do looks more like this (without above comments):

close all

figure

axis equal off

hold on         % I’m Coming

“Hold on I’m Coming” is a song in the pep band folder.

19:59, Third Period

The referee dropped the puck onto the ice.  It was slapped backward to a Cornell player.  The rink was still buzzing with excitement from the tying goal we had just scored in the last minute of the third period.  Then before anyone knew what was happening, we saw a shot fly toward the goal, past the goalie’s arm, and hit the back of the net.  Amidst the yelling and cheers, we looked up at the clock and read 1.0.  With exactly one second left in the game, Cornell had scored the winning goal.

To say that the women’s quarterfinal playoff games against Colgate were exciting is a slight understatement.  On Friday, Cornell had to come from a goal down three times to force the game into overtime.  After thirty-nine seconds of overtime, we came away with a 5-4 win.  On Saturday, the team went into the third period trailing 2-0.  A minute into the third period, they scored a goal.  At that point, the band started hoping they could at least push it into overtime so that it wouldn't go to a third game that we would have to play at on Sunday.

With less than a minute left, Cornell scored the tying goal.  The band started hoping we could win in overtime, again, so we wouldn't have to come back on Sunday.  I guess the team didn't want a third game either, because they scored within the next forty seconds.

We encountered a similar situation a few weeks ago at women’s basketball.  We were playing Brown, and we were up by eight or ten points at halftime, but the team hadn't been playing too well after the first few minutes.  Brown continued to eat away at Cornell’s lead throughout the second half until they were leading.  Somehow, Cornell managed to stay in the game until the very last minute.  With about half a minute left, we were down a point, and we had possession.  After some ridiculous number of timeouts, a Cornell player took the ball to the basket and went up for the shot.

This was a shot we had to make, and the entire gym was watching as the basketball fell through the hoop.  With the additional foul shot, we had a two point lead.  Possession went to Brown, and they immediately sprinted down the court.  They took one shot that bounced off the rim, but they caught the rebound.  With seconds left, they took one final shot that once again, everyone was watching, this time hoping for a very different result.  When the ball crashed off the rim and to the ground, the crowd went about as crazy as I've ever seen at a women’s basketball game.

Apparently our teams have a flair for the dramatic.

How to Make an Essay Longer

There are plenty of people all over the internet whose tips to make a paper longer include making the punctuation size 50, changing your margins to 1.03”, using orange and green striped paper, or something equally absurd, but while writing an essay for my writing seminar, I came across some just as ridiculous actual ways to make an essay longer.

First off, quote poetry.  A lot of it.  MLA formatting will tell you to give each line of poetry its own line in your essay if you’re quoting more than three lines of the poem.  Depending on whose poetry you’re reading, some of these lines will only be two or three words long, but they’ll each get a line in your paper.  With a dozen or so words, you could be up to a quarter of a page closer to the end of your essay.  This also works for long quotes, but regular quotes become single spaced while poetry remains double spaced.  Half the words, double the space.

Second, only cite articles whose authors have really long last names (bonus points if they’re hyphenated).  If no author is listed, find articles with almost exactly the same titles so that you have no excuses to try and shorten the titles in your parenthetical citations like you’re supposed to.

Once you've completed step two, proceed to alternately cite your sources.  Instead of putting one citation after a whole paragraph, put information from a different source in every sentence.  Since all your sources should have citations that take up at least half a line, this should double the size of each paragraph.

Alternatively, you could just write your paper.  Every word you type makes your essay longer.

And in case you were wondering, what is considered the longest last name belonged to a man who can be looked up as Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff.

Scrapes and Bruises

While I was at rock climbing on Monday last week, I came up with a slogan for the class: If it doesn't hurt, you’re doing it wrong.  In which case, I’m doing fantastic.

A couple weeks ago, we were practicing belaying in preparation for taking the belay test, complete with climber on one end of the rope.  I was taking my turn climbing and I was trying to get out of a cave in one part of the wall.  I reached out for a hold . . . and slipped off.

The pulley system and the belay device work to drastically lower how heavy people feel and make it easy to stop them from falling, so I didn't fall, but I did apparently crash into the wall.  I say apparently because when you fall, everything moves fast, and I got back on the wall by myself pretty quickly.  I finished the climb to the top of the wall, got lowered down, and went back to bouldering.

A couple minutes later, I noticed that I’d scraped some skin off a finger.  Oh well.  Didn't hurt too much.  Later that day, I realized my knee kind of hurt.  Turns out I bruised it falling into the wall.

Last week, sometime during foot matching or doing a challenge involving plastic holds and a very long stretch of rock for me to span, I lost some more skin off my hand and an elbow.  (Still not as bad as the time I slid down the last few stairs on the way to a band concert and didn't realize my elbow had been bleeding until after the concert.)

As an added bonus, I got a toe crushed by a door as I was leaving Appel after a two-hour MATLAB coding session.  It’s fine, just like the rest of my body.

Just to make it clear, climbing is completely worth it.  It’s just a little painful now and then.

National Peanut Butter Lovers' Day

As it turns out, March 1^st is National Peanut Butter Lovers’ Day.  As peanut butter is pretty much my favorite food, I somewhat ironically packed myself a peanut-butter-free lunch on Friday and the peanut butter at RPCC wasn't out when I went for dinner.  To make up for it, I guess I’ll have to celebrate for the rest of the year by putting peanut butter on everything.  (Why have I not known about this day until now?)

As far as the rest of lunch packing goes, I've been eating plenty of apples.  I've been getting Empire apples from the dining halls and I really like these apples.  They’re sweet, but slightly sour, and crisp.  If you ask me, the only place mushy apples belong is in pies or other desserts.  They don’t even turn brown after sitting in my lunchbox for a few hours and I don’t do anything special to them, unless mauling the slices with my paring knife counts.  Plus, the Empire was first grown by a nutritionist from Cornell.  Because Cornell is New York’s land grant college and we have lots of apple orchards and cows.

Continuing with the fruit, I realized that I haven’t had any kind of fresh berry since I was home for winter break.  My fruit supplies from the dining hall consist of apples, bananas, oranges, sometimes pears, and plums when they’re more in season.  If someone would like to magically send me some fresh raspberries, that would be greatly appreciated.

Keeping away scurvy with oranges.  Lunch and a snack for after rock climbing
(not Friday's lunch; this one has peanut butter).

One thing about packing my own lunch is that I then have to wash my container.  Since I realized that I could take out one of the inner trays if I was going to pack both sections full of fruit anyway, it’s been one less piece to wash, but still . . . (The reason I didn't pack peanut butter on Friday was actually so that I could just rinse everything instead of getting out the sponge and detergent.)  This is what happens when you’re a college student using exactly one lunch container.  Also, I should really stop letting dairy products dry on my spoon.

Fancy Hockey

Last weekend and the weekend before that, the men’s and women’s hockey teams finished up their home regular season games.  The women went undefeated at Lynah (they tied Dartmouth during their last home game) and the men capped off a sometimes less than great season with a pair of wins over RPI and Union.  (They’re away this weekend at Yale and Brown to completely finish off the regular season; the women have already won the ECAC title due to a win over Union and a Harvard loss.)

It was a fun weekend in terms of hockey, especially since we won, which hadn't happened at home since . . . last semester.  Yeah, it’s been a long month for men’s hockey.   And for the last home game of the regular season, it’s turning into a band tradition to have Fancy Hockey, in which we dress up instead of wearing red/pep band shirts.

After the game (and after the women’s game a couple weekends ago), they had senior night, to recognize the graduating seniors.  After that, when all the fans had left, the band went down onto the ice to get a picture of everyone in our fancy clothing.  That happened to be where the hockey players were taking pictures with their families.  (They had a guy with a professional looking camera.  We were close to resorting to using someone’s iPhone.)

We took a couple pictures, one of the seniors in the band and one of everyone, and were standing around waiting for the actual photographer when one of the hockey players decided to jump into our picture.  Because we’re the band, we got really excited, and a bunch of the other players got into the picture too.  So somewhere out there, there’s a picture of the band all dressed up with a bunch of hockey players lying on the ice in front of us.  Believe me, it was really cool.

That wraps another regular season of hockey at Lynah.  The band will be back next year, but for now, we’re headed into some playoff action (and the lacrosse season is starting).