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?