Sports!

To kick off my first weekend back at Cornell, I went to no less (and no more) than four pep band events for a total of more than fourteen hours of sports. As usual, Cornell athletics did not fail to disappoint, and even went undefeated at the events I attended.

During winter, there’s a hockey game pretty much every Friday night. This past weekend, the men’s team was at home, so we started with a game against St. Lawrence University, which is in Canada even further upstate New York than Cornell. Cornell started the game by scoring two goals within the first five minutes. Then St. Lawrence came back with two goals within a couple minutes. To end regulation time, Cornell and St. Lawrence traded goals twice, leaving the score tied at 4-4.

In overtime, Cornell had a penalty shot with half a minute to go. They missed, extending their streak of not scoring on penalty shots to 26 years, 9 months, and 27 days. (Not so fun fact from the game report: Cornell hasn’t scored on a penalty shot since February 27th, 1987.) St. Lawrence and their three fans were thrilled. The other 4,264 Cornell fans in Lynah, not so much. About 20 seconds later, to finish off the game, there was a fight. A St. Lawrence player was put into the penalty box, then taken out to be escorted off the ice by a ref. That, Cornell was happier about.

And then, to truly cap off the night, another fight almost broke out . . . as the teams were shaking hands after the game. Good sportsmanship, guys.

On Saturday, I went to my first women’s basketball game of the year. Their record is slightly above 0.500, but they managed to get their revenge dominate Columbia after a (relatively) close loss the week before. At one point Cornell was winning by 40 points, and the final score was 76-51. After a break to read my fluids textbook in the band room, I went to the second men’s hockey game of the weekend.

That game was against Clarkson, and they brought their band. Any time there’s another band, the general goal is to outplay them by being 1) louder, 2) better, and 3) generally more amazing. We were definitely the better band, as evidenced by the overwhelmingly unbiased opinion of Lynah.

As for the game itself, Cornell began not by scoring two goals, but by letting two goals in. It did not look good, especially when Cornell’s best shots in the first period both hit the post. Then in the second period, they started coming back and tied the game. About fifteen minutes into the second period, Cornell scored again, to make the score 3-2, which is how the game ended.

On Sunday I finished out the pep band weekend by attending wrestling. The first time I saw wrestling last year, I was extremely confused. This time, I was just confused. As it was my third time at wrestling, I did manage to follow along with most of the matches, but the finer points of scoring go under the general category of Sports!. I’m working on it. In the past couple of years, Cornell has seemed to have very strong wrestling teams, and Sunday did not prove the exception, as they beat Rutgers 29-6, winning eight out of the ten matches. It’s interesting to watch how the wrestlers increase in size as the meet goes on. They start out smaller than the coaches and end up looking down at the coaches. The heaviest weight class (285 lbs.) is also more than twice the lightest weight class (125 lbs.).

To conclude, there were some dominant performances from wrestling and women’s basketball. There were a couple crazy normal hockey games in Lynah, including a high-scoring tie and a come from behind victory. It was a good weekend for Cornell athletics. [Well, except maybe for men’s basketball, who are now 1 and 15. But hey, they finally won a game over winter break.]

Not So Breaking News

Some people may have noticed that I call my blog Life of An Engineer, but my web address is lifeofacheme(.blogspot.com). The story behind that is that the address lifeofanengineer was already taken at the time I started this blog. I was very strongly considering ChemE, so I checked and lifeofacheme was available. However, I was still unaffiliated with any particular engineering major, so I didn’t want to call the blog Life of a ChemE to match the web address. I ended up deciding to take lifeofacheme as the address and use Life of An Engineer as the blog name.

Things have changed since then.

Engineers at Cornell enter unaffiliated with any particular major, which means that they take general engineering classes and aren't considered “part” of a major program yet. This continues for all of freshman year.

As soon as the sophomore engineers appear at Cornell for fall semester, they start getting emails from all sorts of engineering administrators. These emails contain things like important dates for course enrollment, special class information, and the words URGENT: ENGINEERING SOPHOMORES APPLY FOR AFFILIATION RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!  [It appears just like that. Really.]

By urgent, they mean that you should fill out the form and turn it in sometime in the next three months before winter break. In January, your major department will get back to you on whether or not you've been accepted to affiliate with them. At some point in November, I finally got around to filling out the affiliation form. [The thing that was holding me up was actually my advisor’s name. I had my advisor switched from freshman year and I admit that I didn't know how to spell his name.]

I turned in the form, and then a couple weeks ago I received an email. It’s official: I’m a member of Cornell’s Chemical Engineering class of 2016.

So it’s not quite breaking news since it happened about three years ago in news-time, but it is nonetheless news. Exciting news, because I have two and a half more years of ChemE, and who wouldn't be excited for two and a half more years of distillation columns, mass balances, and process flow diagrams?

Olin Hall, home of the ChemEs and where all the fun takes place

The Desolation of Smaug

I've been trying to come up with a good opening line for this post for days, and I still don’t have one, so I’m just going to start with the second sentence. On further thought, I don’t have a good second sentence either. And here’s the third sentence.

Sentence four: Within a span of three weeks I watched The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, rewatched The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, reread The Hobbit, and read the majority of The Silmarillion. That’s about seventeen hours of Tolkien and Middle Earth (sentence five . . . I’ll stop now). My main problem with The Desolation of Smaug (alternate title: Barrel Riding, Smaug Won’t Die, and Who on [Middle] Earth Is Tauriel?) was the same one I had with An Unexpected Journey: nobody falls 500 feet/gets hit in the head nineteen times/gets set on fire and then is a) perfectly fine or b) stunned for a few minutes then makes a miraculous 2.1 second recovery.

Other than that, I thought the movie was very good. Besides the storyline and cinematography itself, I did not fall asleep and I didn’t think the movie was excessively loud. In fact, the twenty minutes of previews were louder than the actual movie because of all the gunfire they had in them. No guns in Middle Earth . . . just force-field-creating staffs and glowing swords and the like. . . . You know, much more realistic stuff.

I’d heard that the actor who plays Thranduil (Lee Pace) was good, and he was. I also found out/realized that the actor who plays Bilbo (Martin Freeman) is Watson on Sherlock. As it turns out, his other role that I recognized is Arthur Dent from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Which fits in perfectly with the fact that he spends most of his screen time confused, ridiculed, insulted, and otherwise verbally abused. [Bilbo: dwarves consider him a burden. Watson: gets called an idiot on a regular basis by Sherlock. Arthur Dent: taken from his home planet and dragged uselessly around the universe.]

Anyway, after rereading The Hobbit I found out that the movies follow the book more closely than I thought. The stone giants from An Unexpected Journey are really in the book, and the eagles do in fact leave the dwarves/hobbit in what appears to be the stupidest place possible: a giant spire that is 1) in the middle of nowhere, 2) super high and steep, and 3) nowhere near the mountain. The dwarves do also escape Thranduil by leaving in barrels, but there is no orc/goblin fight as they’re leaving. In fact, the dwarves are not actually pursued by anything for almost all of the book.

My collection of Tolkien books

As for The Silmarillion, I’d been trying to read it for awhile (i.e., years). I first tried it sometime in high school, got through the horribly dry introduction and maybe twenty pages of the actual book, and stopped. At the end of last summer, I thought I’d try again, made it through about a hundred pages, and got derailed by college. Between Schrodinger, matrices, degrees of freedom, and Aristotle and all his pals, I was not in the mood to read something as dense as The Silmarillion. Because it’s dense. There is no filler material in the book. I guess when you’re trying to write several thousand years of history in 400 pages, every word counts.

Basically, The Silmarillion is a history of the elves: how they were created and came to Middle Earth, and then everything that happens to them up until the end of The Lord of the Rings. It really is dense, but it’s also interesting, if somewhat depressing. Throughout the book, there’s murder, war, treachery, breaking of oaths, anger, greed, and lust; however, there is also some love, and friendship, and the triumph of good over evil. Like I said, it’s interesting, and the book explains certain things, like where the wizards came from, and why Aragorn – the king – ends up wandering aimlessly around the wilderness, and how Sauron ended up in Mordor. While you do have to be interested in Tolkien’s Middle Earth and its history to make it through The Silmarillion, it was well worth my time. Apparently there are over a dozen other books about the history of Middle Earth . . . Summer reading?

161 Things Every Cornellian Should Do, #93 and #120

93. Walk to the Commons and back
120. Rent a Big Red Bike from Uris Library

Two events connected only by the general heading of physical activity and the 161 Things bookended my third semester at Cornell: finally going to the Cornell Plantations and waffles.

The Plantations are a bunch of gardens, trees, hills, trails, rocks, and other miscellaneous nature that Cornell owns. They cover more than four thousand acres (about two hundred acres are considered the Plantations Proper) and I had managed to spend an entire year at Cornell without setting foot on them. That all changed on Labor Day.

To start off the year, AAIV was encouraging all the small group leaders to plan an activity to do with their small group on Labor Day, since there weren't any classes. My small group decided to bike to the Plantations. This endeavor was made possible by Big Red Bikes (and by viewers like you. Thank you. PBS, anyone?). Big Red Bikes is a program that lets students check out bikes from several sites around campus, including Uris Library.

So, to make sure our plan could work, we borrowed a couple bikes from the library and rode around for awhile. Then it started raining. We met the rest of the group and decided that it looked clear enough to go to the Plantations anyway, so we did. It was nice. We went to what I believe is the botanical garden, saw some herbs and flowers, fended off some flies, then rode back to the dining hall for dinner.

Three months later, when everything, including the Plantations, was buried in snow, we encountered finals week. Cornell likes to drag out finals week, which I can appreciate because in theory, it gives you time between finals to study. In reality, you either end up with three finals in twenty-eight hours (not twenty-four, because then you’d be allowed to reschedule a final) or a final every other day so that you get to spend one day cramming for each final. Fall semester, I ended up with a final on the first Thursday (p-chem) and Friday (linear algebra) and a presentation (mass and energy) on the Thursday after that.

It didn't sound too bad until I realized that the written report for the presentation was due Monday and I had an essay for history of science due Wednesday, both before the p-chem final. Classes ended on Friday. I went to large group for AAIV for the first time in more than a month on Friday night. Saturday I went to an AAIV event in the morning and men’s basketball and men’s hockey in the afternoon/night for pep band. Sunday, we got to work on the project and spent eight hours on it. Eight. There was a dinner break involved. Monday, we finished up the project in another two hours. By that time, I had less than two days to write my 1500 word essay.

I ended up spending another ten hours on the essay between Monday night, all of Tuesday, and Wednesday morning. At that point, I could finally start studying for p-chem. I showed up utterly unprepared for the final on Thursday morning. After the final, I had to start studying for linear algebra. That final, on Friday morning, went better. And so after that week, the only thing I had left was a ten minute presentation on Thursday night, six days away.

That is the backstory of how the sophomore ChemEs ended up hanging around Ithaca for almost a week waiting to give our mass and energy presentations. Since all the work was already done, all we had to do was make a short PowerPoint and practice, all of which took about six hours. Six hours, six days. Eight hours, one day. I sense a slight imbalance in the Force.

And since we had nothing else to do, a couple friends and I went to get waffles on the Ithaca Commons. I know it was just waffles, but you could choose your own toppings and they turned out really good. It’s only about a mile to the Commons from Cornell, so we walked both ways. It’s entirely downhill going from Cornell to the Commons, so conversely, it’s entirely uphill going back to Cornell from the Commons. The waffles were worth it.

Third Down, Five to Go

It’s third down, five to go. Do you
a) Try and run the ball. It’s only five yards and you might be able to get the ball through.
b) Attempt a pass. Again, since it’s only five yards you just need a short pass.
c) Give up and punt.
d) Change the unit of measurement to semesters and transition into talking about college.

Answer: d. I have survived yet another semester at Cornell. Not that I had much say in it, but here’s what I thought of the classes I was told to take this semester.

Honors Physical Chemistry I: Mainly, I enjoyed complaining about Mathematica and the Schrodinger equation. Other than that, it was interesting to approach chemistry from a more mathematical standpoint. We modeled chemical bonds as harmonic oscillators, discovered that orbitals are a lie, and complained some more about Mathematica.

Mass and Energy Balances: I didn’t want to dislike this class. I don’t think anybody goes into a class wanting to hate it. Though I didn't end up hating this class, I didn't love it either. I’d seen a lot of the material in Intro to ChemE last fall, but I didn’t mind that. Without going into too much detail, the class wasn’t structured in a way that let people learn and figure things out for themselves. Other than that, the material was interesting, and I thought the homework problems and projects were good. [Minus the due dates for the projects. The first project was due the morning after a p-chem prelim. The second project was scheduled such that my group ended up working on it for seven hours straight on a weekend. The final project was due during study break. By the time we thought to question whether that was even allowed, we’d been working for five or six hours and were “almost done.”]

Linear Algebra for Engineers: Out of the three math courses I’ve taken, I think this was the easiest. Part of it was due to the professor; he allowed prelim corrections and his prelims were very straightforward. It turns out that linear algebra and p-chem share a fair amount in common, to the dismay of the chemical engineers. Once was enough.

History of Science in Europe I: As it turns out, my liberal studies class required me to both read a lot and write essays. But I stuck with it because it fit in my schedule and I was actually interested in the topic. The class provided background information for how modern science (all the things I use in my other classes) developed. More work than I expected/was looking for in a liberal studies class, but I consider it worth it in the end. Though I don’t think I’ll be taking History of Science in Europe II. My excuse: it doesn't fit in my schedule.

Day Hiking: After nine years of mostly suffering through public school physical education, I can say that PE in college is much, much better. I took hiking just to get off campus once a week and tramp through mud, get bitten by bugs, and scratched by branches.

The Blogger’s Paradox

When you have something to write about, you have no time to write about it.

When you have time, you have nothing to write about.