The No-Longer-Hypothetical List of Exciting Things That Have Happened to me at Cornell, Fall 2014 edition

In an effort to get caught up with my usual end of semester posts, I started thinking about what exciting things I did in the past semester . . . and I couldn't come up with anything. Well, not totally nothing, but not much. I spent a good portion of the semester in class, at office hours, working on problem sets, and generally not getting enough sleep. There were, however, some less mundane events. Here they are.

1. Intramural soccer – I played intramural soccer for my dorm again this fall. For whatever reason, interest in playing for the team was drastically less than last year, and at our last game, only three members of our team decided to show up. After we forfeited, we were initially going to combine the two teams to scrimmage but we didn't even have enough players for that, so we played world cup instead. To play, you have a goalkeeper and pairs of players all trying to get the ball into the goal for their team. Last person to touch the ball before it goes into the net is credited with the goal. If the goalie saves the shot, he kicks the ball back out onto the field. As the teams score goals, they leave the field and move on to the next round. The last team who hasn't scored is eliminated from the game and a new round starts with the remaining teams.

I ended up with one of the players from my house and we started out by almost getting eliminated in the first round. Almost, because then we got the ball into the net and moved on. And kept moving on until we reached the final round. We began the final playing two on three but to make the teams even, we added the third player from our dorm to our team. We won, which was a happy end to a frustrating season. And then I went to office hours.

2. Ice skating – During finals week, the pep band and the men’s and women’s ice hockey teams hosted a charity skating event at Lynah Rink. Although I have spent dozens of hours in Lynah, I had not yet ice skated there. In fact, I had not ice skated ever before in my life before deciding that I could not spend another hour studying for my orgo final and that I should take a break by going ice skating. The rink turned out to be pretty busy, but it was a lot of fun, and I would go ice skating again.

3. Madison Square Garden – Over Thanksgiving break, I went to MSG with the pep band again, except we won this year. It was a come from behind victory and completely worth the nine hours on a bus.

4. Thanksgiving – Although I was abandoned stayed voluntarily at Cornell for the Thanksgiving break, I still got plenty of Thanksgiving food. For lunch, I went with people from my dorm to one of the North campus dining halls  where they were holding a traditional Thanksgiving meal. Later that day, a couple (ChemE) friends and I were invited to another (ChemE) friend’s dinner. They had cooked at least half a dozen legitimate dishes, plus dessert. All the food was great, plus I drank the most alcohol I’d ever had at once. A whole three ounces.

Then there were the usual ChemE happenings: We stayed in Olin past midnight working on problem sets (over five straight hours). We had a late night dinner in which we discovered that a dish called the triple crispy consisted of two plates – one was a plate of rice; the other was a heaping plateful of a variety of fried meat. We set record low means on our prelims and finals (41% on the orgo final). We ate, worked, slept didn't sleep, struggled, lived, and hung out together, and we’re going to do it all again next semester.

Two Years

I realized recently* that I've been writing this blog for two years now. This will be my 161^st post in twenty-four months, for an average of 6.71 posts per month. That average, however, is brought up by a spring semester freshman year in which I only took four classes - Intro to Microeconomics, a first year writing seminar, MATLAB, and differential equations. Econ was less than two hours of work a week and I did all my essays for my writing seminar the morning night before they were due, so I was essentially taking two classes. Maybe two and a half.

With my relative abundance of free time, I went to every pep band event, went rock climbing two or three times a week, and blogged. I averaged 13.5 posts a month during that semester, and without those numbers, I averaged 5.35 posts a month over the past two years, which is slightly high compared to this year’s average (3.83; 9.33 in 2013). Here’s a graph, because I like graphs:

Particular months to note: this April I only wrote once because of the impending doom known as finals while having fluids and pchem problem sets due every Friday, with the additional possibility of also having bio problem sets due on – guess – Fridays. The only month in which I wrote more this year than last was July, due to the fact that I spent this summer in Ithaca with what was essentially a 9 to 5 job. Instead of having classes from 9 to 5 and then working on problem sets for another six hours, I worked from 9 to 5 and then was done for the day.

This past semester while I was trying to pass two ChemE classes, two chem classes, and a liberal studies class that actually took time all at once, I wrote less in the entire semester than I did during a single month of spring semester freshman year.

So in the past two years, I've survived four semesters of college, living in an apartment with my cooking for three months, and affiliation with Chemical Engineering, and written tens of thousands of words about my questionable decisions good life choices, adventures, and epic quests. Next semester I have four ChemE classes, a liberal studies class, and a ChemE seminar. It’s going to be interesting.

*Actually recently, not I-meant-to-post-this-three-weeks-ago-and-didn't-edit-it-recently.

First to Five

Yesterday, for the fifth time, the New England Revolution found themselves playing for the MLS Cup, and for the fifth time, they found themselves in second place after two hours of soccer. And it hurt.

Why, you may ask, do we care about grown men and women chasing after balls and waving sticks in the air? Why do we find ourselves overly emotionally invested in games that are, after all is said and done, exactly that – games?

Maybe we see something when we watch players gut it out, grit their teeth and get down to work to get the ball moving away from their goal to the other side of the field. Maybe there’s a little bit of magic in watching the soccer ball leave a foot and a puck leave a stick and knowing they’re going to hit the back of the net. Maybe the celebrations and pain and everything else we feel as a result of those hundreds of square meters remind us of the best and worst of the rest of the world out there. And maybe we just like watching a good hockey fight or grown men head butting each other.

One of my favorite movies is Miracle, which is about the 1980 United States Men’s ice hockey team. Besides the fact that the games were played at Lake Placid, a few hundred miles from Ithaca; and Ken Dryden, arguably Cornell’s best goalie ever, was the color commentator at the Olympics; and Mike Eruzione, the captain, was born and raised in New England; it’s about a team that nobody thought could win. But they did. It took months of hard work, but they finally turned into a team that beat the best in the world and went on to claim an Olympic gold medal.

I guess I was hoping for some of that for the Revolution, who now have sole possession of the most number of times losing MLS Cup. I listened to the thirty minutes of extra time on the radio, and they didn't give up or bunker down to make it to penalty kicks. They fought for a goal, left it all out on the field. After following the Revolution through the past five or six years, I thought this might be the year they finally got the cup. They’d been building up a team of college kids from the drafts and local academy products, backed by Revolution veterans and coached by a player who had played in every minute of the Revolution’s previous four MLS Cup losses.

I followed the stories as they started out hot, then lost eight straight games in the summer, then started – and kept – winning up until losing MLS Cup yet again. They didn't have the high budget roster or international signings to match their opponent, but they had a team.

I've been on the other side too. Sometimes we weren't quite the underdogs that the Revolution were, but sometimes we were. I watched Cornell score an overtime goal against Harvard in the last home game of the season, which was also the last game the seniors would play in Lynah. I spent two weekends watching the women’s team become ECAC champions on late goals in four consecutive games. I saw Cornell come from behind to beat Penn State at Madison Square Garden and fight to a win against the nationally ranked University of Denver at Lynah.

Do I wish the Revolution had one of those happy endings? Well, yeah. But they went further than a lot of people thought they could, and they did it with their usual low budget roster (plus one major signing from the USMNT) while playing in a cavernous football stadium in the miserableness known as New England weather. So here’s to you, Revolution. I’ll see you next season.

Hey, Ocarina

While I was at Cornell for the summer I took advantage of the moderately decent weather to visit the farmer’s market on multiple occasions. There was the time I walked to the farmer’s market after walking to Cass Park from Collegetown (four miles total, because why not?). There was the time it started pouring right after we left. There was the time I got my very own ocarina.

Thusfar, I’d only spent money at the farmer’s market on food. There’s a really popular Cambodian food place that I tried. I had rice with potatoes and chicken in some sort of curry-like sauce that was good. Another time a friend and I had peanut lime noodles and corn fritters from another place that were really good, followed by a strawberry lemonade and a raspberry chocolate shortbread bar that I saved for later (both also good). The only thing I’ve eaten at the farmer’s market so far that was disappointing was a samosa. The filling was bland even though I dumped in several spoonfuls of sauce.

But back to the ocarina. Thanks to The Legend of Zelda, I already knew what an ocarina was when I saw them at the farmer’s market. I decided that I was going to spend my hard earned money on something other than food because 1) The Legend of Zelda and 2) obscure woodwind instrument. First, The Legend of Zelda is my favorite video game series; my brother and I first played through Wind Waker and Four Swords Adventure, then my brother played most of the old Zelda games, after which Twilight Princess came out, and finally Skyward Sword. I’ll always remember Wind Waker as the first Zelda game we beat, but the dungeons in Skyward Sword rival it, plus Skyward Sword has (finally) an orchestral soundtrack and benefits from MotionPlus on the Wii. Also, Link is originally left handed and my favorite character to play on Super Smash Bros. Second, I appear to be starting a collection of instruments, including my clarinet, a recorder from third grade music class, and a tinwhistle. With that kind of solid reasoning behind my choice, I decided to buy an ocarina to add to my collection.

The ocarina I got is a five hole ocarina, and I currently know how to play a major scale on it. I can play most of Davy (the fight song) and O Christmas Tree the Evening Song. I’m thinking ocarina Christmas caroling in a few weeks. Who’s with me?

The View from Saturday (and All the Other Days)

When I was in elementary school, one of my favorite books was The View From Saturday by E. L. Konigsburg, who also wrote From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, another book I really liked. I’m not sure why I liked it so much, because it’s about a middle school quiz bowl team, sea turtles, and tea parties, and not mountain climbing or ukulele playing goats*. But I recently (last year?) found The View From Saturday at either a book sale or picked it up for free and reread it, and I still liked it.

Maybe it had something to do with the point in my life around middle school where I decided that I didn't like fantasy books (don’t ask me why) and preferred reading realistic fiction. I have since progressed on to reading anything, including the fantasy novels The Lord of the Rings, most of the Harry Potter series, and this summer, American Gods and the start of the Discworld series, as well as my lease and software agreements.**

On a tangentially related note, I also just realized that the bus scene in The View From Saturday is a lot like the opening of Park and Eleanor, which I just read for fun because young adult novels are marginally easier to read than my organic chemistry textbook. Both scenes are about the new kid trying to find a seat on a bus with already established seating. I rode the bus to and from school for nine years straight (fourth to twelfth grade) and kindergarten on occasion (back when there were still more students enrolled in half day than full day kindergarten). People sat in different seats every day and the only year my stop was at the end of my driveway was fourth grade. Then there was the late bus, which was only obligated to drop us off within a mile of my house and preferred to leave us to walk home from the end of the street. So I've done my time on the school bus.

Finally, the point of this post was not to discuss my weird reading habits or bus stories (I've got more for another time), as interesting as they may be. What I actually wanted to talk about was the view from my dorm room, which I get every day, not just Saturdays. (See the connection?) I moved to the fifth floor of the same dorm I lived in last year, to the suite that is as physically far away from the laundry room (in the basement) as possible. On Tuesday when I did laundry, I counted and it took over 300 steps to get to the laundry room. Multiply by six and that’s what it takes to get clean clothing.

To recap: what I wanted to do was show some pictures of the view from my room but I did so in the most complicated way possible. And here are the pictures taken through my window.

The Cloud that Ate Ithaca: Coming Soon to a Theater Near You

Pre-winter at its finest

Good morning, Cornell University.

*Note that I have not actually read a book about ukulele playing goats.
**Note that I do not recommend the last two for leisure reading.

Much Excitement

After using column chromatography to separate a mixture of two chemicals, I turned in two solids that appeared to be different in my orgo lab practical. I recovered 0.064 grams of my original 0.17 gram sample for an overall percent yield of 37.6%. I’ve done worse.

My bruise is fading. From the center out, but hey, it only took two weeks. I suspect it was from rock climbing but I don’t recall hitting anything hard enough to cause the subsequent explosion of purple and red on my kneecap.

It’s hockey season. The women’s team is 0 and 3, and they’re already playing ECAC games, which is concerning. I haven’t seen them play because they were away last weekend and their game yesterday was at 3 pm. I have class until 4:30 pm. On a Friday. It sucks* is suboptimal. The men’s team opened with a pair of 3-2 wins in exhibition games last weekend, then tied the University of Nebraska Omaha 1-1 last night. Rematch is tonight. Things might get violent.
*Not a Lynah approved word

Surprise package:

I have a thing about penguins. And also applesauce, peanut butter, and hats. And also against tight pants, half naked Halloween costumes, and finely chopped celery.

This is happening.

From MLSsoccer.com:

The Best and the Brightest

As an Ivy League Institution, Cornell attracts some of the greatest young minds. Case in point:

1) The other day, I was going to eat breakfast in the dining hall in my dorm. I live on the fifth floor, so I have quite a few stairs to descend to get to the dining room, which I access by crossing over to the other side of the building on the second floor. On my way down, I caught myself passing the second floor landing and figured I just wasn't fully awake yet. One day later, I was returning from dinner and going up the stairs when I walked past the fifth floor and started up the flight to the (locked) roof. Stairs are hard.

2) When the weather could still be considered nice out, I was periodically going for bike rides. The other week, I biked out to the Arboretum and back just for the fun of it. As I was wrestling my bike back into the bike room, I shifted a gear. It’s not good for the bike to shift gears without pedaling, but I didn't want to wrangle my bike outside to pedal for fifteen or twenty feet, then have to get it back inside, so naturally I tried pedaling in the eight feet I had in the bike room. I’m sure it looked absolutely ridiculous, but I did eventually get my gear to shift to where it was supposed to be.

3) A couple weeks ago in lab, I showed off my impeccable lab skillz. Part of the procedure was to preweigh a round bottom flask, so I massed it and recorded the result in my lab notebook. After evaporating a solvent in the flask, leaving a white powdery product, I reweighed the flask and product. The total mass was less than the initial mass of the flask. I made negative mass! Not really. When I first weighed the flask, it was slightly wet. I thought that a little water wouldn't matter. Then I found out that the maximum amount of product I could make was 0.032 grams. That little water? Mattered. But it doesn't end there. I then ran my product and a standard solution on a chromatography plate. The general idea is to use a liquid to carry the two samples distances up the plate. My product moved. The standard did not.

Things Engineers Don’t Say

Rise and shine; 8 am classes are the best!
I get too much sleep.
It was really hard to choose my classes this semester because I had so many choices.
I should take more classes next semester.
Fugacity is my favorite physical chemistry topic.
I love everything about statistical mechanics.

Let’s name all our variables η.  That’s not confusing at all.

We should go faster in class. I understand everything.
Could you write messier? I can read your handwriting.
Taking notes on my computer is really easy. Especially the equations.
Poetry analysis? My favorite.
My essay is too long. I wish it could be single instead of double spaced.
I don’t know why I scheduled a lunch break. Having seven lectures in a row is great.
All labs should be windowless basement rooms lit by flickering light bulbs.
My lab technique is flawless.
I am so ready for the prelim tonight.
The textbook readings were super interesting this week.
I bought all five of my textbooks new and spent less than a hundred dollars.
I read three hundred pages of ancient Greek texts last night in an hour, no problem.
All my problem sets this week were easy and short.
Office hours? I never need office hours to get my problem sets done.
I don’t spend enough time working on my problem sets.
No class on Fridays or Mondays. Four day weekend!
My professor cancelled class. Again.
I have nothing to do tonight. Let’s go to a party.

At the Library Again

In the over two years I've spent at Cornell, I have not studied at the library once. Over the summer, however, I did make use of the library to fill my free time by borrowing a number of books to read for fun. Apologies to more sensitive readers for using the f word.

Unfortunately, my experience was that the Cornell library system did not have every book I searched for. I guess the books I was looking for must have been extremely obscure or wildly unpopular. Probably both.

I got my book recommendations from online lists I stumbled upon and out of the books I managed to hunt down at Olin Library, I didn't hate any of them, but some were definitely better than others. Some of my favorites:

2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke) – I read the whole Odyssey series, but the first book was the best. I enjoyed the whole series, but if you’re not a big science fiction fan and/or don’t have time to read an entire series, at least read the first one. Although the movie shows up on multiple “Most Confusing Movies of All Time” lists (yes, I do spend too much time looking up random stuff on the internet), I didn't think the book was confusing at all.

Discworld, Terry Pratchett – There’s an entire series of Discworld books, and this summer I read the first two, The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. If The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (one of my favorite books) is science fiction humor, the Discworld books are fantasy humor. There was adventure, weird characters in a strange world, and utter ridiculousness.

Our Town, Thornton Wilder – The last play I read was The Importance of Being Earnest, in the spring of my junior year of high school. So it’s been awhile. I really liked the descriptions of life in a small New England town, probably because I did most of my growing up in a small-ish New England town.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell – Along with Brave New World and We (Yevgeny Zamyatin), Nineteen Eighty-Four is considered one of the most influential dystopian works. I have not read We, but I ended up liking Nineteen Eighty-Four more than Brave New World. There wasn't any particular glaring failure of Brave New World; I just like Nineteen Eighty-Four better overall.

It was a good summer in terms of books (and overall) and one of the reasons I wrote this post is because I forgot a picture in the last summer reading post I did. What trip to the library is complete without some penguins?

You know you’re a Cornell student when . . .

I’m back on campus for another thrilling year of the ChemE life. To kick things off, here’s how you know you’re a Cornell student:

- any distance less than a mile is “a quick walk”
- it’s perfectly normal to have a clock tower, a dairy, a thirty-foot climbing wall, and a 4,000 acre garden right on campus
- all. the. hills.
- you have a deep distaste of crimson

You know you’re an engineer when . . .
- you can’t remember the last time you were on the arts quad
- you know all your Greek letters but you've never taken a language class
- when you write lab reports, there are more words that spellcheck thinks are spelled incorrectly than words it recognizes
- you either have a prelim every week for ten weeks straight or three prelims in six days twice a semester
- you mentally draw free body diagrams/analyze chemical reactions/explain real life using things you learned in class that didn't seem relevant at the time

You know you’re a ChemE when . . .
- when you say Olin, you always mean Olin Hall, not Olin Library
- two hour recitations and prelims are normal (apparently, other majors don’t have weekly two hour recitations and normal prelims are one and a half hours)
- for fun, you complain about problem sets, non-engineering majors, writing, liberal studies classes, the temperature in Olin, the lines in the only all-you-can-eat dining hall on Central Campus, and the color of the sky, among other things
- you’ve been in Olin past midnight

Twas the Night Before Classes

Twas the night before classes, and all throughout campus

The students were stirring, raising a ruckus;
The textbooks were dropped on desks without care,
In hopes that the first day of school would not soon be there;

The students weren't nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of equations tormented their heads;
And ChemEs in the dorms, and I in my hat,
Had resigned our brains to wrestle with Schrodinger’s cat,

When out on the hill there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew in a flash,
And heard from below a thump and a crash.
The moon on the grass of the slope down below,
Set the hill and the trees and the campus aglow,
When what to my half-asleep eyes did appear,
But some drunk college students clutching bottles of beer.
Leaving my window with some things left unsaid,
I turned back to my room and tried to go back to bed.
But more rapid than thirty-second notes the equations they came,
And they stayed in my brain and I knew them by name:
Now Henderson, now Hasselbalch, now Navier and Stokes,
Now Bernoulli, and Maxwell, Reynolds and Helmholzt.
Explaining fluid flow, and acid concentrations,
There were laws and rules, formulas and relations.
And round my brain, the equations they flew
With their letters and symbols, and differentials too-
And then, in a twinkling, I heard in my head
Another voice saying, “Go back to bed.”
As I closed my eyes, and was falling asleep,
Slowly away the equations did creep.
But I heard them exclaim, ere they slipped out of sight,
“Happy semester to all, and to all a good night.”

The Last Days of Summer

As summer winds down, I’m preparing for the new things another semester always brings: new problem sets, new late night problem set homework sessions, new sleep deprivation, new drunk screaming neighbors, new levels of complete and utter failure, and the like. But before all that begins, I do have to say that I had a good summer. I hiked three of New York’s State Parks, biked around the Cornell Plantations, visited the Farmer’s Market, read for fun, spent some quality time with Hezekiah, mastered routes on the bouldering wall, and enjoyed Ithaca in summer. I also got blisters and bruises, was bitten by a couple dozen insects, and got rained on every other time I tried to leave Olin, but I’m willing to put all that aside for the greater good.

Last year I gave unasked for back to school advice. This year I’m here to talk about the evils of the corporate world having a job and working 9 to 5. In three words: don’t do it. You will slowly feel the life leaching out of you until one day you find yourself sitting at a table peeling dried glue off of your fingers and asking yourself “What is the meaning of life?”

Just kidding. I worked fifty-three days this summer designing fluid mechanics models without a full weekday off. In the end, we have a model ready to be built and three others in various stages of development to show for our work. It was totally worth it. I made enough money to cover my rent and food, gained design experience, and – dare I say it – had some fun every other week or so.

It was a different experience, working straight through the middle eight hours of the day, then getting back to the apartment after five and having absolutely nothing to do. No office hours, no problem sets, no parties. I went to sleep at 10:30 last night and woke up before seven voluntarily, then couldn't go back to sleep for the first time in months. I’m going to savor that moment, because it’s not going to happen again unless I switch into Arts and Sciences anytime this year.

So now that I have a few days off before classes start, how do I plan to use them? I have a couple things to wrap up to prepare for the school year, then I’m thinking I’ll get a few last books from the library to read for fun before all the books I pick up have Greek letters and chemical formulae in them, maybe go biking around campus. One thing I will not be doing: solving any fluids problems. Well, maybe just one . . .

Left Handers Day 2014

When I was a child, I was not ever forced to switch my dominant hand, but I was given approximately zero help in school, leading to an incorrect pencil/pen grip and long-lasting psychological problems. I also have a special place reserved in a deep fiery pit of hatred strong dislike for contoured right handed scissors. Because what I really wanted was to gouge out a chunk of my index finger while I hack ineffectively at lines that I can’t see so that I can glue together a picture of a pond habitat. Which is to say, I am left handed.

The Left Handers Day website covers information about the holiday and Anything Left Handed has more information about being left handed, including a selection of left-handed pens and pencils. If they weren’t at least five dollars per pen, I would probably hunt one down just for the heck of it. Yes, I am aware that five dollars isn’t that much, but I like to buy ten cent ballpoint pens because I’m cheap. Actually, most liquid ink pens smudge too much and pencil has too much friction and gets all over my hand. When I was in elementary school, sometimes when eating lunch after not washing my hands, I would get graphite marks on my sandwich. Tasty, and I’m sure all the added bacteria was also great for my health.

There are plenty of other places online with lists of famous left-handed people and things like that, so instead I’m going to discuss something about handedness and hockey that I unearthed in the middle of the last hockey season and one of my favorite Bible stories.

Sometime during hockey season, I was looking for information about a game on the opposing school’s website and noticed that they listed their players’ handedness on their roster. Rather than seeing a list of R’s like on baseball rosters, there were (very) roughly equal numbers of hockey players who were playing right and left handed. It turns out that in America it’s slightly more common for hockey players to be taught to have their dominant/stronger hand on the bottom of the stick while in Canada and probably the rest of the world it’s taught that the dominant hand should be on the top of the stick. While the former tends to have more power, the latter has more control. Either way, there’s about a 60-40 split between players shooting right and left handed. Which way the handedness leans depends on the country.

One of my favorite Bible stories was shared fairly recently, but in honor of Left Handers Day, I’ll share it again. It’s about Ehud, the left-handed judge. Ehud is raised up by God to help the people of Israel, who are being oppressed by the king of Moab, Eglon. One day, Ehud goes to the king’s palace with tribute for Eglon. After presenting the tribute, he tells the king that he has a secret message for him. He is only checked for weapons on his left side and is allowed to meet privately with the king. At that point, Ehud pulls out his dagger from the right side and stabs the king in the stomach. The king’s entrails fall out and Ehud goes home, where he gathers the Israelites to go kill ten thousand Moabites. Then there are eighty years of peace.

Moral of the story: Don’t trust left-handed people bearing secret messages Celebrate Left Handers Day every August 13th.

Here Be Dragons

In this edition of Summer in Ithaca, I walk five miles to see boats and eat noodles, take a bus going in the exact opposite direction of Cornell, and sprint to catch another bus back to Cornell, all in under five hours. The day began bright and early with a walk to Cass Park, where the 9th annual Ithaca Dragon Boat Festival was in full swing.

My best description of a dragon boat is a less streamlined crew boat with less efficient paddles. It does, however, have more people crammed into it. I met up with some friends, some of whom were rowing and some who were just watching, watched a couple races, and then a friend and I decided that we should walk over to the Farmer’s Market. The Farmer’s Market is less than two hundred yards from Cass Park. Unfortunately, those two hundred yards are covered in a not insignificant amount of water, i.e. the river.

A little over half an hour (and two miles) later, we made it to the Farmer’s Market, where we had an unimpeded view of the whole dragon boat course. We sat on the dock, saw some close races, and waited for Cornell to race. Before Cornell raced, we got to see Harvard race in the lowest division finals. Not only did they lose to Cornell earlier in the morning (which I regrettably missed), but they proceeded to lose their finals race by more than an entire boat length.

When it was Cornell’s turn, they started out well, then the other boats started to catch up. By the time they were crossing the finish line, it was so close we couldn't tell who won, especially from our viewing angle. As it turned out, Cornell did, by a fraction of a second. So a satisfactory end to that set of races.

Cornell’s next race wouldn't be for some time and I wanted to get back to campus to get some work done hide out in my room so my friend and I went to get lunch at the Farmer’s Market. We got peanut lime noodles and corn fritters. The noodles were very good; the corn fritters were good, though a little expensive, though not as expensive as a meal I had in Collegetown that 1) was already expensive, then 2) I had to pay tax and tip, and 3) I was still hungry right afterwards. Considering that I can often get two meals out of a single dish at other moderately priced restaurants, this was worse than not worth it. So I would get the corn fritters again but I will not be eating at the Collegetown restaurant unless someone wants to buy me dinner, in which case I’d probably still choose a different restaurant.

I also got a strawberry lemonade (also good, but all the sugar . . .) and a chocolate chip raspberry shortbread bar. . . . It was not a health food kind of day. After lunch, we wandered around a little more, then went to catch the bus back to campus. The first bus that showed up was heading to the Ithaca Mall, the opposite direction we wanted to go. We got on anyway. The way to the mall did include a nice view of Cayuga Lake, so that was a plus, though I don’t think that made up for the fact that we started the ride two miles from campus and ended the ride two miles from campus.

We got off the bus, started walking to the stop where we could catch the bus that was actually going to campus, and ended sprinting to the stop where we could catch the bus that was actually going to campus. And fifteen minutes later, we made it back to campus.

Taughannock Falls State Park

In one of my latest summer adventures in Ithaca, a friend and I drove to Taughannock Falls State Park to do some hiking. Being summer, it was more crowded than the last time I went to Taughannock, and there were whole bunches of people on the Gorge Trail. The Gorge Trail is pretty short and flat in the extreme. Back on campus, it takes me more time to get to the Dairy Bar and I get more elevation gain walking to chemistry lectures from my dorm.

Still, the Gorge Trail is a nice walk (even with the crowds) and it ends near the base of the falls itself. It was marginally drier than in the fall, but still not as bad as that time I went to Buttermilk Falls with my family and I could have produced a more convincing waterfall with a decent hose. If you haven’t seen a picture, here’s what the main waterfall looks like:

We walked back to the trailhead and decided that since we were there and we’d covered the Gorge Trail in a little over half an hour, we might as well hike the rim trail too. Rim trails in upstate New York state parks tend to be pretty wooded, and this was no exception. It was a lot quieter and after some initial steps, it was mostly a pleasant walk in the woods. We got the occasional glimpse of the gorge below on the South Rim Trail, then we hit the point where we crossed over the gorge right by the upper falls. Instead of being at the bottom of the falls, this time we we looking down at the falls, which was pretty cool. We returned to the parking lot by the North Rim Trail, which followed the road more closely.

Upper Falls

On the way back, we got to an overlook where we got another view of the falls. Somewhere along the way we also got to look down the whole gorge to Cayuga Lake.

All told, we walked/hiked for a little over two hours and depending on which map you believe, we either covered 4.125 or 4.94 miles. The 4.94 miles comes from what appears to be a newer map, and based on my typical walking speed (fast, according to multiple of my friends) and general lack of elevation gain or loss, I’d believe it without too much problem.

It was nice to get off campus, do some hiking, and spend time with a friend. I had a great time. Now to find a ride for my next hiking adventure.

Dinner for One

My culinary skills are about as varied as a picture of a polar bear in a snowstorm, but I do occasionally manage to muster up the energy and brainpower to cook something other than pasta with tomato sauce. I make up my own recipes mainly because I don’t know how to use spices because I’m a pioneer in the field of the culinary arts. At the end of the summer, I think I’ll write a cookbook and call it ChemE Cooking: Dinner Engineered. All the recipes will take less than five ingredients, cook in less than twenty minutes, and taste just like all the ingredients have been thrown into a frying pan/pot/oven and then had the life cooked out of them. No salmonella here!

As a preview of my soon-to-be-bestselling cookbook, here are some of the featured items. First off is lemon chicken paired with baked carrots. To make this highly sophisticated recipe, one simply slices carrots into thin strips, coats them in oil and salt, and dumps them in the oven for about fifteen minutes. Remove them from the oven when they look shriveled. As for the chicken, that is fried in oil for a couple minutes, then a mixture of water, lemon juice, and sugar is added. The liquid is allowed to boil off and reduce until the chicken is in danger of being dried to a crisp cooked and tender.

Next is a classic American staple reimagined for a ten-minute cook time: pizza, in toast form, also called pizza toast. In this dish, one toasts a couple slices of bread in butter in a frying pan, then adds tomato sauce and cheese.

Finally, for those nights when one wishes to have a light but elegant dinner, I would suggest the fruit and cheese plate paired with a clear wine. The sweetness of the grapes contrasts with the saltiness of the cheese and crackers specially imported from the United States while all flavors are enhanced by the clear wine, nicknamed by scientists Le Solvant Universel.

Other recipes from this high-class cookbook will include overcooked broccoli, omelets with random vegetables in the fridge, and the peanut butter and jam sandwich.

At the Library

Now that I have this thing called free time I've been frequenting the library to borrow books to read for fun. The Cornell library has a massive selection of books, but unless I want to end up with La Chasse des canards or Harvest of grief: grasshopper plagues and public assistance in Minnesota, it’s really hard to browse. Even with the Library of Congress Classification System categories, looking at call numbers starting with PR – a fraction of a floor of one library – only narrows things down to the entirety of English literature.

So I've been going with the call numbers for random book recommendations in hand and this summer I've read a mix of science fiction, young adult fiction, and more “classic” novels.

I first read Arthur C. Clarke when I picked up Rendezvous With Rama at a library book sale a couple years ago. Over spring break, I finished the Rama series and this summer I've started on the Odyssey books. Thusfar I've read 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: Odyssey Two. There are definite similarities in the two series – space travel and alien life being a couple of the themes that have made an appearance in all of Clarke’s books I've read so far. One kind of cool thing is that Clarke wrote about using Jupiter’s gravity to accelerate a spaceship deeper into space in a kind of slingshot maneuver, which is exactly what the Voyager probes did, before Voyager 1 or 2 launched. [I read a book about the Voyager probes last summer, and while it wasn't terrible, I was hoping for more about how the probe was designed and run and things that happened on its journey and the author focused more on exploration in general.]

My first library trip this summer, I went in looking for 2001 and was wandering the shelves in the English literature section when I found Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s works. I decided not to pick up any Sherlock Holmes at the moment and instead went with The Lost World, in which a newspaper reporter, an academic, an adventurer-type, and an overbearing professor explore a remote mesa in South America, where, the professor claims, there are dinosaurs. I found part of the ending a bit anticlimactic but overall the story was interesting, with plenty of action in the second half of the book.

Moving on from dinosaurs to pirates, I borrowed a young adult book titled Pirate Cinema by Cody Doctorow as a quick read. The pirates in this book do not sail the seven seas, but instead illegally download things from the internet and stay in abandoned buildings. It was a less dense read than some of the other books I've been going through, and the storyline is rather relevant to today’s technology-filled world. The general feel of the book reminded me of The Thief Lord with laptops.

Finally, to round out my selection of two dystopian novels, two novels based in England, and . . . aliens, I read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. This book considers a world where people are raised from birth to have a particular intelligence, social class, and job. They cannot imagine being happy doing anything other than what they have been conditioned to do and if they ever start becoming unhappy, there’s a pill that can fix that. Brave New World is one of those books that’s on lists of “100 books everyone should read” and that comes up periodically on Jeopardy! and trivia quizzes, so I figured I should actually read it. I enjoyed it, but I wouldn't want to live in the world Brave New World describes. So far I've liked everything I've borrowed from the Cornell library system and haven’t had to suffer through dutifully enjoy titles such as Feed and The Life Before Us that have been past summer reading assignments. I’m currently working on Donna Tartt’s The Secret History with the first two of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels still to come. If anyone has any book recommendations, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Carry On My Wayward Son

Or daughter. I have to confess that after only a month of being in charge of my own finances and groceries, I went out and bought this:

Yes, that is both crunchy peanut butter and raspberry jam with seeds in it. Two things that will not be found in my home (New England home, not Cornell) because my father does not like having little things to bite through in his condiments.

Other things that will not be found in my house since I left for college: dairy products including milk, cheese, and a 32 ounce container of yogurt. Apparently my parents have decided to try out soy milk and almond milk instead of cow milk. Both of the dairy milk alternatives aren't bad – I tried them when I went home at the beginning of the summer – but almond milk feels like drinking nuts and soy milk tastes less sweet than cow milk to me. Naturally, I decided to solve my non-dairy milk problems by mixing almond and soy milk, which tasted pretty good to me. Back at Cornell, I've returned to cow’s milk, which I like the taste of, so don’t even try to tell me about how humans aren't supposed to be drinking milk after the age of two or whenever.

As for the cheese, I like cheese and I like dishes with cheese in them and I currently have one and a half blocks of cheese plus a few cheese slices in the fridge. I even tried making macaroni and cheese the other day and it was good. Apologies to my parents who can’t imagine how something cheesy and creamy can taste good.

And then the 32 ounces of yogurt. It’s just cheaper to buy it that way, plus now I can have yogurt all week. One final note: don’t worry, I haven’t stooped to eating raw broccoli yet.

The Little Engine that Couldn’t

Last semester in p-chem II we learned about the Carnot cycle and the Carnot engine. Way back in elementary school, we read “The Little Engine That Could,” which taught that you can do things if you just believe you can. Unfortunately, this is the real world. Sometimes, you just can’t:

161 Things Every Cornellian Should Do, #141 and [#57]

141. Ring the giant bell in the Plantations

57. Have a [it’s] midnight [in China] picnic in the Cornell Plantations*

As a stereotypically cheap college student with no car, my main mode of transportation is my own feet. That plus the summer college students and ten billion** construction projects going on around campus making things not as quiet as I would like them means that I've been out to the Plantations a few times already this summer. Usually I just go out to the Botanical Garden, where I remember that I don’t actually like the smell of flowers, but a couple weeks ago I went through the Wildflower Garden and to the start of the Arboretum (1st picture from my last post). The trees to people ratio was much higher and I didn’t hear any 1) screaming drunk people, 2) screeching tires, or 3) heavy machinery. It was just me, the flies, and my penguins.

I've been out further before, once with my hiking class and once when a friend and I decided to go have an adventure on the Plantations. When I went with my friend, we hunted down the giant bell, rang it, and enjoyed the view. Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera with me. Enjoy this picture of the Botanical Garden instead.

There was another day this summer when I biked out to the Botanical Garden on my lunch break, where I proceeded to have my lunch at the Cornell Plantations. I’m not sure I’m ever going to have a “it’s midnight in Ithaca” picnic on the Plantations, but it was definitely midnight in China when I was eating, so that’s my stand-in for now. I prefer to be sleeping at midnight in Ithaca, though apparently my problem sets last semester didn't feel the same way.

*Words in parenthesis added by me.
**This is only a rough estimate. The real value may be several billion projects off.

Summer

Summer is . . .

Blue skies and long grass

Bike rides

Dirt, and sweat, and long treks in the woods

Road trips

And construction.

Trending

Among my other end of semester statistical analysis, I decided to repeat my calculations relating time spent studying to prelim grades. The results from the first round of prelims (Spring 2014) led me to the conclusion that studying leads to worse grades.

Round 1

The second round of prelims not only followed the same general trend, but was even more mathematically convincing.

Round 2; note the R² value

I also took estimates of how I spent my time duing fall and spring semester of my sophomore year and made some more pie charts. If I chose my representative week correctly, in the fall Physical Chemistry I and Mass and Energy Balances were my most time consuming classes, followed by History of Science in Europe I, then Linear Algebra. That sounds about right, since History of Science had a lot of reading while Linear Algebra only had weekly problem sets that weren’t too horrible. Mass and Energy Balances didn’t feel like it took up a lot of time, but I guess it did between lecture, recitation, problem sets, and the occasional project. P-chem I had less class time, but more “why isn't Mathematica working?” time.

In the spring, Fluid Mechanics won the “which class is eating my life?” award, though Biomolecular Engineering and Physical Chemistry II were close contenders. Physical Chemistry Lab, a two credit class, still took almost twice as much time as Introductory Macroeconomics, a three credit class.

A more general analysis led to the calculation that there was a 22% increase in the amount of time I spent in course-related activities (lecture, problem sets, etc.) from 32.25 hours in the fall to 39.58 hours in the spring. I also managed to get about 2.75 hours more sleep during spring semester, but lost 9.6 hours of other activities. Which would explain why I sadly missed most of the pep band events in the last couple months of classes.

We’ll see what fall brings.

3rd of July

For the first time since after my freshman year of high school when I went to Disney World with my family, I got to see live fireworks tonight. Ithaca does fireworks for July 4^th and you can see them from the Cornell campus, so a friend and I made the trek over to the slope to watch fireworks.

There were some fairly impressive fireworks. No pictures in the sky or anything like that, but it wasn’t just balls of flaming light in the sky for twenty minutes. Some of the fireworks changed color, some of them had multiple colors, they had different burn times, some of them were obscured by buildings or clouds . . . wait, that was just due to where we were sitting. What was kind of funny was that the first firework that came up was directly behind one of the dorms on West Campus. At the end of the show, it looked like some of the lower fireworks were missing their bottom half. Turned out there was a smoke/fog cloud right between us and the fireworks. Such is life.

Anyway, proof that I did indeed leave my apartment:

Happy 3^rd 4^th of July.
Edit: So I was thinking, and if industry, research, and academia don’t work out, making fireworks is a legitimate use of a ChemE degree, right?

Meet the Penguins

So when I said I’d introduce the penguins “very soon,” I really meant “more than a month later.” I blame my permanent writer’s block.

I’m not sure exactly how the idea for the penguins was born, but I know I saw these photos (there’s also a Facebook page). I liked the idea and started thinking about what I had that I could photograph. All my LEGOs were at home, so I didn’t have any minifigures. My LEGOs are still at home; I meant to bring some back with me this summer, but I forgot. Guess I should have packed more than twelve hours before leaving. Anyway, I thought (shocking, I know) some more and decided on a plastic animal figure.

The next time I was at the mall to go to Target, I stopped by AC Moore to check out their selection of plastic animals. I was looking for a penguin, because I like penguins, but the only one I could find was about three inches tall and cost four dollars. I considered a couple cheaper options, and then I saw a whole tube of penguins. They were only an inch or two tall, but there were eleven of them, and they were on sale for five dollars. They came back to campus with me.

I then decided to name them after the Fellowship of the Ring. Here they are:

Front row: Merry/Pippin. Middle row: Frodo, Gandalf, and Sam. Back row: Legolas, Boromir, Aragorn, and Gimli

The penguins occasionally travel with me and they tend to see the world from a different perspective. I plan to feature them on the blog every so often, because who doesn’t want to see life as a two inch tall penguin?

1189

Among the other things I meant to write about and didn't was the fact that last week I came to the 1772^nd page of a book and finished reading its last (the 1189^th) chapter. It was a book that took a very long time to finish, but it was a very good book. There were battles, journeys across deserts and oceans, visions and prophecies predicted and fulfilled, and even a left-handed judge who wasn't properly checked for weapons and who killed an opposing ruler by plunging a dagger into the enemy king’s stomach. And then the king’s intestines fell out.

Upon completion of the 1772^nd page of the Bible, I decided to go back and start again at the beginning. This time I’ll be reading chronologically. Hopefully it takes me less than six and a half years this time. Reading fairly regularly, I got through the New Testament in nine months (October 2013 – June 2014) and that was about one third of the Bible, so there is light at the end of this tunnel. Projected ETA: 2.25 years.

Art

First off, I am back at Cornell in the midst of summer college, tour groups, and no less than four major construction projects around the main part of campus. I have thus far survived mostly on cereal, peanut butter and jam sandwiches, pasta, frozen vegetables, eggs, and a variety of fruits.

Second, there is currently a giant root outside of the Johnson Art Museum.

I can’t find a picture of it right now, but I just wanted to let people know that I happen to have a smaller version at home. It’s an original work, produced by spade and manual hedge trimmers, and I would be willing to let it go for the right price.

Third, I became the owner of a tablet about a week before returning to Ithaca. It’s one of those that graphic artists and photographers use to make art, but since my art skills peaked in elementary school, the most useful thing it’s done for me so far is turn about six pages of handwritten equations into computer text. I honestly don’t think it was much faster than typing everything up, but it was less painful due to the preponderance of Greek letters, superscripts, and fractions. If you've ever had to type up equations in Microsoft Word, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, be glad.

Since, of course, my photography is usually only slightly blurry and slanted nearly professional, I was semi-interested thrilled to also be able to download a version of Photoshop that came with the tablet. It only took my sale-price high-end laptop three hours to download. Once I got to try Photoshop, I had no idea what I was doing instantly became a Photoshop master and produced such quality photos as these:

It was a dark and stormy night.

When the Statue of Liberty came alive.

And then we went to Mars.

So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish, part 2 of 3

I’m going to start this off by borrowing a line from the Beatles and saying “I get by with a little help from my friends.” Once again, this broadcast year has been made possible by Cornell University, my family, and contributions from viewers like you. Thank you.

It was an insanely busy/crazy year, but a very good one, so I’d like to recognize the people and groups who were a part of it:

- my family

- friends who participated in my adventures biking, rock climbing, roaming campus, venturing out onto the Commons, doing problem sets, hanging out in the dining hall, and baking

- AAIV, particularly my small group

- Cornell Productions, because hauling all that equipment up and down stairs must build character, or at least muscle, or something . . .

- the Big Red Pep Band

- the professors who taught us some stuff that we promptly forgot after the final will remember for the rest of our lives and the TAs who had to deal with us (there’s nothing quite like the panicked night-before-problem-sets-are-due crowd)

- Cornell’s ChemE class of 2016, because suffering is always less painful when done together. Here’s to two more years of late nights, impossible problem sets, and pain and despair.

The Courses of Semesters Past and Future

Because I spent the past semester beating Mathematica into submission and drawing the same boundary flow diagram on each of the nineteen parts of my fluids problem sets, I never got around to writing about the courses I’m enrolled in for next semester. [Not that I got around to writing much of anything last semester.] Since it’s now the end of the semester, I’m combining that post with my review of the classes I just finished (if I passed . . .).

Spring 2014:

Honors Physical Chemistry II: This may be colored a bit by the fact that I had a downright awful time with the final, but I’m more than a little glad to be done with p-chem. The second semester of p-chem covers everything from partition functions to thermodynamics to kinetics. The material was interesting and the problem sets were a good way to get practice, but I found a few too many of the exam questions dependent on studying exactly the right material or else finding you had no idea how to solve the problem.

Fluid Mechanics: Fluids and I got off to kind of a rough start, but it ended well. As compared to p-chem, the material was more applied, which is why I decided to major in chemical engineering, not chemistry, in the first place. The problem sets tended to walk a fine line between challenging, but doable, practice problems and what-the-heck-am-I-doing question fests at office hours. In case anyone was wondering, Olin is very quiet at midnight on a Friday morning.

Biomolecular Engineering: I enrolled in this class because it fulfills my bio requirement in the least number of credits. From what I heard from ChemEs who took this class last year, it underwent a major rehaul. That, however, does not excuse the fact that I found the class rather disorganized. Each lecture in and of itself was interesting, but I had little to no idea how most of the topics connected to each other.

Introductory Macroeconomics: Liberal studies. I spent three times as much time on fluids as this class and both classes were worth the same number of credits. The class was decent and I don’t regret taking it, though discussions weren't particularly helpful.

Physical Chemistry Lab: If I had to sum up this class in one word, it would be spectroscopy. I enjoyed the labs overall, though some of the lab reports leaned toward the tedious side. For the record, Excel and my computer do not appreciate having to plot 33,186 data points.

Fall 2014:

Introduction to Experimental Organic Chemistry: The organic chemistry version of the p-chem lab I just completed.

Principles of Organic Chemistry: In an unprecedented act, the ChemE curriculum has given me a choice. I can either take two semesters of orgo in one semester and go into less depth or take the first semester of orgo indepth. I chose the first option partly to get exposure to a full year of orgo and partly so I could jam my liberal studies class into my schedule.

Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics: Every other engineering major has their own thermo class, and this is the ChemE version. Haven’t heard anything good or bad about this class.

Heat and Mass Transfer: Another ChemE required class.

Introduction to Creative Writing: As part of my liberal studies requirement, I have to take a couple 2000-level classes that are, in theory, more advanced than 1000-level classes. Creative writing is not only 2000-level, but it’s also from a different category than my previous liberal studies classes. I know this class can vary depending on who teaches it, but a few of my engineering friends have survived it, so I thought I’d give it a try. Blogging totally counts as a form of creative writing, right? . . .

Small Boat Sailing: I've wanted to try sailing, so I’m taking the opportunity while I’m at Cornell to do so.

The No-Longer-Hypothetical List of Exciting Things That Have Happened to me at Cornell, Spring 2014 edition

As it turns out, this spring was busier than last fall. Attending class and doing problems sets was already the equivalent of a full time job with overtime, except I had to pay to do it. On top of that, I continued working for Cornell Productions, going to pep band and AAIV, and rock climbing in my spare time. Sometimes I even got to do fun things like eating and sleeping. As always, however, it was indeed exciting. Here’s the list:

1. Slope Day: My Slope Day experience involving the slope consisted of this:

The stage seems to be missing some parts.

The slope seems to be missing some people.

This was actually the day before Slope Day. On Slope Day itself, a couple of friends and I went to Cornell’s Hoffman Challenge Course, which is a ropes course about five miles off campus. They have high wire traverses (multivine, lily pads), a 64-foot replica of the clock tower with different ways to climb to the top, a zipline and swing out of the clock tower, and a trapeze, among other elements. I ended up doing a couple of the traverses, climbing the clock tower, and ziplining out of the clock tower. It was fantastic. [Thanks to Alternative Slope Day for organizing the event!]

The multivine

2. Going solo: I was sent to the Bear’s Den for Cornell Productions alone a couple times. Which meant that I was completely in charge of setting up, sound check, making sure nothing went catastrophically wrong with the sound during the show, and packing everything up nicely at the end. Besides the time that half the outlets weren't working, doing the shows alone wasn't too bad. At least I knew beforehand what the events were, unlike the time I showed up to work with another person and we were informed right then and there that a seventeen-piece live band was coming in. Thankfully there were several shared microphones.

3. Summer research: There’s a story behind how exactly I was offered my summer position, but the general idea is that I’ll be making models that demonstrate fluid mechanics (yes, I did spend the entire semester complaining about fluids; no, I did not actually hate the class – more about that in the next post). Besides getting to spend the summer in Ithaca when the sun exists, the project sounds like it could be pretty interesting.

4. Fancy hockey: For the last regular season home game of men’s hockey, the pep band members have the option of dressing up in fancy clothes. To make things even more exciting, this year the last home game was against Harvard. Wikipedia has an entire article on the Cornell-Harvard hockey rivalry, so it must be legitimate. To start off Harvard’s night, the pep band plays the theme from Love Story when they come out onto the ice for warmups. In Love Story, much as in real life, Harvard plays Cornell in a hockey game and loses. Later, when Harvard comes out for the lineups, the Cornell fans (excluding the pep band) throw fish onto the ice. And on this particular night, Cornell managed to come back from two goals down to put the game into overtime. Then with thirty-six seconds to go, a Cornell player scored the winning goal. How’s that for the senior hockey players’ last game in Lynah?

5. Penguins: I will very soon introduce the penguins that you may have met in my Mother’s Day post. They have been travelling across campus with me and are part of a photo project. As an added bonus, I got them on sale.

Halfway There

During my freshman year of high school I was mandatorily made to join the marching band if I wanted to be part of concert band. It was a bit of a misnomer because we didn't do any marching. We spent the time at football games watching the clock, learning the cheerleaders’ cheers, and trying to keep warm enough to be able to play. Then for about ten minutes in the middle of the whole ordeal, we’d run onto the field, stand there, and play the halftime show before running off. One of the songs in our halftime show was “Livin’ On A Prayer” by Bon Jovi. The chorus of that song goes as follows: “Whoa, we’re halfway there/Livin’ on a prayer/Take my hand and we’ll make it – I swear/Livin’ on a prayer.” Seems fitting to describe the first half of my college career.

What have I learned so far? No matter how early you start p-chem or fluids homework, you will always be finishing both problem sets at 2 in the morning on Friday. There’s no such thing as “a quick question.” Always carry an extra pair of socks. Earplugs aren't a bad idea either. I also solved the Navier Stokes equations, discovered the wonders of quantum tunneling, celebrated Valentine’s Day with MATLAB, used both the very sophisticated coffee cup calorimeter and a bomb calorimeter, and much, much more.

This past semester was my busiest yet (though according to my preliminary data analysis I actually got more sleep this semester than last) but it was also a whole lot of fun. There were impromptu field trips, baking mishaps, the end of hockey season, the start of the MLS season, and penguins.

I currently have a few weeks off and I’m hoping to do some writing here before I have to get back to work. There are some usual end-of-semester posts I’ll put together and then I’d like to highlight some of the things that made my spring semester so busy. [Problem sets. So many problem sets.]

This x 25 = problem sets for the Spring 2014 semester

A Message from the Penguins

[You haven’t met them yet, but my penguin friends are here to bring you a message today. They’re named after the Fellowship of the Ring from The Lord of the Rings.]

Pippin: May the Eleventh be with you!
Gandalf: Fool of a Took! It’s May the Fourth be with you. You’re seven days late.
Pippin: Seven? Eleven . . . minus four . . . hold on a second here . . .
Merry: That’s seven, Pip.
Pippin: All right then. But I did think there was a holiday today.

Aragorn: It’s Mother’s Day.
Pippin: What’s that you said?
Aragorn: It’s Mother’s Day, little halfling.
Pippin: That’s right. Happy Mother’s Day!

Study Less, Get Better Grades

First off, the answers to my St. Patrick’s Day math problems. 1) The probability that the leprechaun has drunk a gallon of beer is 1. The numbers on opposite sides of a normal six-sided die always sum to seven. 2) No leprechauns go home sober. The probability of flipping an infinite number of heads with a fair coin is zero. (1/2)^infinity = 0. 3) The game theoretically never ends because with a coefficient of restitution of zero, the ball doesn’t bounce. In actuality, the game ends when the leprechauns pass out, so the answer to the last question is “very drunk.”

Next up, my latest very scientific analysis definitively proving that studying makes your grades worse. I meant to put this up after my first round of prelims, but I was busy with f*****. [Note for anyone who clicked the link and was expecting something very different: 1) Count the number of asterisks again. 2) Get your mind out of the gutter.]

My first round of prelims was scheduled such that I had three prelims in seven days. I still can’t decide whether I prefer having that happen or having one prelim every week for the majority of the semester, which I did last semester. Anyway, the fluid mechanics (fluids) prelim was a Thursday, so I spent the weekend before the prelim getting ahead on homework for other classes (I admit I also worked a shift for Cornell Productions on Friday night and went to pep band for all of Saturday afternoon/night). I started studying for fluids on Monday. In between going to class, doing other homework, and other mostly necessary things like eating and sleeping, I got in almost five hours of studying for fluids.

After the two and a half hour fluids prelim, I had to go and finish my physical chemistry homework. I just had a few things to wrap up, so it only took two hours. I took Friday off, did other homework on Saturday morning, went to pep band on Saturday afternoon/night, and studied for p-chem mostly on Sunday and Monday. I ended up getting in about four hours of studying for p-chem.

The p-chem and macroeconomics prelims were scheduled for the same time, so I took the makeup exam for macroecon on Wednesday. That meant that after the p-chem prelim I went back to my room and studied for econ. By which I mean I reviewed a previous prelim for 40 minutes. Then on Wednesday I went to my six hours of class, followed by dinner, followed by the prelim. Notice I did not have time to study for econ on Wednesday. Notice that the only time I mention studying for econ is for 40 minutes on Tuesday night.

This is what happened when I got my grades back.

Note the trend of grades decreasing as more time is spent studying. Ignore that there are only three points on the graph. Also ignore the fact that each prelim was taken for a different class. Further ignore the fact that a lot of the macroeconomics material was a review of microeconomics, which I took last year. In addition, ignore the fact that each class has a different curve. The takeaway lesson is that studying obviously makes grades worse. According to the best fit line, I should study about -1 hour to get a hundred on my next prelim. It’s too late for fluids, but I still have p-chem and macroecon coming up after the break (in the same week . . . again).

St. Patrick’s Day

The Google Doodle of the day tells me that it’s St. Patrick’s Day today, so what better way to celebrate than with some math problems?

1) A leprechaun is playing a game. He rolls a die, and every time his roll and the number opposite on the (normal, six-sided) die sum to seven, he drinks a quart of beer. After four rolls, what is the probability that the leprechaun has drunk a gallon of beer?

2) At the leprechaun bar, the probability that a leprechaun is forbidden another drink by the bartender is the same as the probability of flipping an infinite number of tails in a row with a fair coin. How many leprechauns go home sober?

3) Two leprechauns are playing ping pong with a ball with a coefficient of restitution of 0. The loser of each point drinks a pint of beer. What is the final score of the game, how long does the game take, and how drunk are the leprechauns at the end of the game?

Answers to come in my next post, and for the record, here’s the real reason St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated.

Pi Day

As of right now, I do not have any pie, but I do have some very exciting pie charts. A couple weeks ago I tracked/estimated the amount of time per week I spend on various activities. I was either in class or doing homework/class related activities for about 47 hours, I got just under 56 hours of sleep, I spent about 10 hours eating, and the remaining 57 hours of the week were spread out among a large number of other activities.

Here’s what the pie chart looks like (click to zoom in):

Other includes everything from travelling to and from class, church, rock climbing , pep band, going to see Frozen, listening to the Revolution game on the radio, and blogging, among other things.  What’s underrepresented in this particular week is pep band, because I ended up having to skip most of the events to do problem sets and go to office hours.

Then I decided to break down my class time to see how much time I spent on each class. In terms of lectures and discussions, I have 2 and a half hours of biomolecular engineering, 3 hours and 20 minutes of physical chemistry, 3 hours and 40 minutes of physical chemistry lab, 4 hours and 25 minutes of fluid mechanics, and I’m supposed to have 2 and a half hours of economics. I say supposed to because my TA never showed up for discussion. Class time total for the week: 15 hours, 50 minutes.

That was added to any homework, studying, or prelims for the week, which included a p-chem prelim, an econ prelim, 7 hours of fluids homework on Thursday, and 6 hours of bio homework on Friday. It was a fun week, but aren't they all?

Here’s the pie chart for the breakdown of my class time:

Even with a p-chem prelim instead of a problem set, I think the numbers came out about the same as usual. We have bio problem sets due about every other week, so that number can vary a lot. As for fluids . . . I have no words to sum up this class.

So to close, have a Happy Pi Day. I have the entire afternoon free, but don’t worry, my next round of problem sets should be assigned in a few hours.

The Aliens are Here

I don’t know why the sky is that color, but it’s unnatural, so it must be the aliens.

Cornell wins, Jenny dies, end of [Love] Story

Letters

Dear Google,

Why is it that the newsletter from Diversity Programs in Engineering at Cornell goes to spam despite me marking it as “not spam” every single week for the past five months but an email informing me that I have won 50,000 pounds – which is 81,420 US dollars, by the way – makes it into my inbox? I guess the sender’s email address of 19378578@mail.com sounded more legitimate than @cornell.edu.

Sincerely,
No regrets for giving mlssoccer.com my email address so I could watch the Revolution on the Free Stream of the Week


Dear Minesweeper programmers,

Solve this:

Sincerely,
If I wanted 50-50 chances I would have played roulette


Dear New England Revolution,

Thank you for finally making the playoffs last season. However, in light of how last season started out, here’s a friendly reminder. On the soccer field, there are two goals. Your goal, and your opponent’s goal.

This is a soccer ball:

The ball goes into your opponent’s net.

Sincerely,
Revolution Fans Everywhere


Dear Peter Jackson,

I don’t care how sturdy dwarves are; nobody falls five hundred feet, gets up, and goes “Don’t worry. I’m fine.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but last time I checked Middle Earth wasn’t No Physics Land.

Sincerely,
F = ma