Singapore 2018

Back in November, I took my first big trip in years to visit extended family in Singapore. I was out of the office for over three weeks and to make up for the vacation time, worked through Christmas and New Year after I returned to Ann Arbor. A large part of the trip was seeing (and meeting) family, but since it was my first time back in Singapore in close to fifteen years, we also did a lot of the touristy things. The goal is to get everything written and posted before summer.

I started my journey to the other side of the world by flying home to New England for a couple days. We had just gotten new music for concert band, so I ran through it before leaving. I ended up missing three rehearsals and didn’t have a chance to practice while I was in Singapore, but managed to catch up before the concert because we happened to have ten rehearsals between our first and second concerts of the season. We’re preparing for our third concert and started out with six rehearsals, but the first got cancelled by snow, so we’re down to five weeks to prepare.

Hong Kong airport

The first leg of our flight was fifteen and a half hours in the air to Hong Kong. The only way to describe this is long. Everyone boards, they make the safety announcements, the plane taxis, takes off, you settle in, they feed you a meal, you take a nap, see a couple movies, and check your watch. You’re only eight hours into the flight and you still have that long to go. But overall, the flight was fine. The food was edible, though the eggs were not quite right. I watched Ready Player One and the Shaun the Sheep movie and rewatched Big Hero 6. Ready Player One was okay. They changed basically all the details and only used the general plot, but it made sense in the context of reading vs. watching.

We landed in Hong Kong in the morning with enough time to eat before catching our connecting flight. After our snack(?)/breakfast(?)/dinner(?), we found our gate and boarded the plane for the last three and a half hours to Singapore. We were fed second breakfast at lunch time (more questionable eggs) and I rewatched Zootopia. And then we landed in Singapore, went through immigration, claimed our baggage, and were greeted by family. Before we left the airport, we had another undefined meal (the first of many), then we stepped out into the hot, humid embraces of the Singapore weather. We had arrived.

ChemE 6350: The Theology of Colloids

[October 2018]

The actual reason I was in Houston was not, shockingly enough, to see space shuttles and astronaut gloves, but for a conference. A rheology conference. Rheology is the study of the flow of matter, but because it’s a scary science word¹, it often gets “corrected” to theology, as you might have guessed from the title of this post.

Also shocking, more than three dozen people were in attendance at this conference. The conference attracts all the rheologists (not theologists) in the country, including former Cornell ChemE classmates, lab members, and a professor. Due to graduation, all of us are now at different schools, but it was nice to catch up with some familiar faces. My current lab had a few of us in attendance, plus our advisor, another professor and student from the University of Michigan, and one of our collaborators. Besides all these people who I personally knew, there were also professors who I met when I visited Carnegie Mellon, professors whose papers I’ve read, and a couple of those names who everyone in the research area just knows. If you’ve never heard that academia can be a bit incestuous, you’re hearing it now.

The Gerald D. Hines Waterwall park, right next to the mall where we were staying

This particular conference ran from Sunday evening to Thursday morning. The only event on Sunday is a welcome reception which basically turns into all the professors cross-examining each other about research, all the students alternately avoiding/being ignored by their advisors, and everyone eating free food while trying to see who’s there that year. For the next three and a half days, the day begins with a plenary lecture followed by seven hours of talks by students and professors. I presented during the last slot on Tuesday, which wasn’t a terrible time. I had a day at the conference to prepare, time afterwards to relax and listen to other peoples’ talks, and it was so late in the day no one bothered to show up. The talks cover everything from theory to molecular simulations to experimental techniques about polymers, colloids, polyelectrolytes, surfactants, and more.

In the evenings, after the talks are over for the day, the conference plans an event. Monday night was a trip to a local brewery, where we had dinner, got as much beer as we wanted to drink, and received a pint glass with the society’s logo on it. It’s the drinking accessory I never knew I wanted. Tuesday night was the awards banquet. I didn’t attend because it costs extra money and you have to dress up, but I went to the pre-banquet reception because it was open to everyone, I had a drink ticket, and there was free food. Wednesday night was the poster session, also with free food. I’m a fan of this conference for several reasons. One, it’s small enough that it’s not overwhelming, but large enough that you’ll probably be able to find someone else doing semi-relevant work. Two, we went to a brewery. The last time I attended, the conference was held in Baltimore and the social event was at the aquarium. And three, free food (and alcohol). You could almost survive on free food alone if you supplemented with granola bars.

At the brewery (Monday night)

On Thursday, one of my lab mates, my travelling partner, and I left the talks a little early (sorry to anyone still presenting) to wander the mall and get Chick-fil-A before leaving for the airport. At the airport, our basic economy tickets afforded us the opportunity to board with group 4 and sit in the window seats in the very last row, the third-to-last row, and the sixth-to-last row. We had an uneventful flight back, and with that we returned to a cold and dark Ann Arbor. It was a good trip. I fulfilled my graduation requirement of presenting at a national conference, saw some fellow Cornell alumni, had Texas barbeque, went to Space Center Houston, met up with a Cornell friend attending school in Houston, and had fun.

¹Phenolphthalein, a common indicator² used in acid-base titrations, is one of my favorite science-y words to spell because of that “lphth” string in the middle.

²The one that goes from clear to bright pink at a pH of 8.2. It’s often used in freshman general chemistry labs, and no matter how many times the TA reminds everyone to put the indicator in the base before beginning the titration, someone will always forget. Half an hour later, when this student has dumped three gallons of acid into their beaker without witnessing a color change, someone will cautiously bring up the indicator. When a single drop of phenolphthalein is added, the solution will go from clear as a mountain spring to 90s neon windbreaker pink.

Houston, We Have a Problem

[October 2018]

While working out the logistics of transportation and lodging for my first conference as a grad student, it was discovered that flying there on the day the conference started would cost over a hundred dollars more than flying a day earlier. Plus we’d have to fly out of Detroit at five or six in the morning. Since I was planning to travel with another student and split the cost of the hotel room, we decided to travel to Houston a day early and spend some time doing things outside of the hotel. We left Detroit at 8:45 on a grey forty-five-degree morning and emerged in Houston three hours later to sunshine, humidity, and eighty-five-degree temperatures.

There were only a couple things I wanted to accomplish with our extra free day in Houston: 1) go to Space Center Houston and 2) have Texas barbeque. In order to achieve these goals, we opted to rent a car, which turned out to be a great decision. Texas is not made for walking. Everything is miles apart, and even the things that are close together are separated by ten-lane roads with no crosswalks as far as the eye can see. So if you’re ever travelling to Houston and get advice to rent a car if you’re going anywhere more than twenty feet from your hotel, take it.

Mission Control

From the airport, we drove to the space center, stopping for semi-authentic tacos for lunch on the way. After paying for tickets, we were advised at the information desk to line up for the tram tour first to make sure we made it on to a tour. There are two tram tours, one that focuses more on the astronaut training facilities, and one that goes to mission control. We ended up in the line for the mission control tour, which drives through some of the NASA campus before stopping at the mission control center, named for Chris Kraft, a former flight director who was later director of the Manned Spacecraft Center (now the Johnson Space Center). We didn’t get to directly see the controllers working (we saw them on a TV screen), but we did see the room where they train them for the ISS (International Space Station). It still looks similar to the control rooms from the 60s that sent astronauts to the moon, except the computers are smaller and there’s less cigar smoke.

Saturn V

Following the guided part of the tour, we were dropped off at Rocket Park, where they have a collection of (surprise) rockets – Little Joe, a Mercury-Redstone, and a Saturn V. Little Joe was used for unmanned tests of the Mercury capsule. The Redstone was used for suborbital Project Mercury flights; it was followed by the Atlas for orbital Mercury flights, the Titan II for Project Gemini, the Saturn IB for unmanned testing of the Apollo modules and Apollo 7, and finally the Saturn V for the remaining Apollo flights. After seeing the Saturn V – it’s the length of a football field and had a building specially built for it – we caught the tram back to the space center.

Training shuttle + 747

The indoor exhibits there include information on Mars missions, some of the items used by astronauts on the ISS, and post-Apollo space activity – Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz, the shuttle and ISS. We also saw a film on an ISS EVA (extravehicular activity, or spacewalk) gone wrong, which was interesting. The last exhibit we saw was outdoors. They have a modified Boeing 747 used as a shuttle carrier aircraft with a (mockup) shuttle attached. The 747 was stripped of almost all its passenger seats and reinforced where the shuttle was attached, and is now filled with exhibits about the conception and development of the idea to use a plane to carry the space shuttle. It’s pretty cool; there are three levels you can walk through, the first being the 747 and the top two in the shuttle itself. Once we finished this, we had seen most of the space center, so we headed off for dinner. (Barbeque, a long wait, but this was our best chance to get Texas barbeque since we spent the rest of the week carless and in the hotel. It was worth the wait for brisket.) As for the space center, if you have any interest at all in space, Space Center Houston gets a definite go from me.

Apples and Autumn

[September 2018]

There are many things associated with fall. Back to school. Cooler temperatures. The leaves changing color. Corn mazes. Bonfires. Hayrides. Pumpkin patches. Apple picking. And going to cider mills for fresh cold cider and hot apple cider donuts, which is just what a group of students/young adults from church met up to do on the first really fall-ish Saturday of September.

Chickens

I’ve been to cider mills before, while road tripping through New England in summer. [We got hot donuts anyway, because is there a wrong time for fresh apple cider donuts? The correct answer is no.] In New England, you’ll be driving along a two-lane state highway when you see a dented metal sign for a cider mill, so you turn off onto an even smaller road, and finally pull into a gravelly dirt parking lot in front of a wooden storefront adjacent to a dark wooden barn. Inside the barn, you get a tour consisting of an educational video made in the 1990s that can be summarized as “Look at these apples! Apples are healthy! When you press apples you get apple cider. Doesn’t that look delicious?” and a live cider making demonstration. If you haven’t seen it before, the apples are cut and mashed into a slushy, pulpy slurry. The apple slurry is then layered on cloths in a series of wooden frames. When there are enough layers, the whole stack is pressed, and the liquid that comes out is cider. The remaining solids are called pomace (thanks, Wikipedia), and are used as cattle feed. After the tour, you go into the store, which sells items like cookbooks, cinnamon-scented candles, lingonberry preserves, and cider and donuts.

Besides the sale of cider and donuts, the cider mill we visited in Michigan had almost no similarities to my previous cider mill experiences. Compared to the mills I’d been to before, this one was a zoo. Or more accurately, a farm. I mean this literally. When we got there, the parking lot was packed. There was a line stretching fifty feet outside of the main building. Past that were the farm animals. There were goats, chickens, ducks, some other birds, a cow, tractor rides, hay bales, and a wading pool of corn kernels. There were also children everywhere.

Farm animals and children

After close to an hour’s wait, we got our cider and donuts. Were they worth it? Yes and no. No, because an hour is a long time to wait. But yes because donuts, and as long as you know what to expect, I guess it’s okay. They handle the line well, but if you’re spending most of your time in line, it starts to feel more like going to the store and less like going to a cider mill. In the balance between a slick commercial operation and family-owned specialty shop that hasn’t been renovated since 1973, the cider mill we visited falls a little too far on the commercial side for my taste, but if I had a car I’d go back. At a less crowded time. Like a rainy Tuesday morning.