Spring

There’s more soccer news, plus visitors to Ann Arbor, fireworks, and a road trip, but we’re going back to spring for this post. In between all the other things I was doing, I continued going to the Arboretum and also paid a visit to the Botanical Gardens, to get some dirt under my shoes and get away from the constant traffic noises. In case you hadn’t figured it out yet, I don’t like people/cars/cities/noise in general. Or umbrellas, jeans, scarves, celery, or excessive air conditioning, but we can talk about those other things another time. Right now we’re here to see pictures of plants.

The Botanical Gardens, like the Arboretum, are run by the university. Last time I was there, I went with a friend with a car; this time, it was just me, so I biked. It’s not a terrible bike ride in terms of length or traffic. It was early April when I was there, and I wasn’t sure what would be sprouting/in bloom when I got there.

Lots of life in the outdoor gardens

Turns out, not much. With my vast knowledge of flowers – I can consistently identify about three whole separate flowers (dandelions, tulips, and Queen Anne’s lace) – I wasn’t too disappointed. My favorite thing to photograph at the Botanical Gardens anyway are the cacti. The cacti live inside the conservatory, and I spent some time adding to my collection of cactus pictures. I guess since there aren’t any waterfalls or gorges nearby, I’ve settled for photographing these friendly spike balls.

These guys were in bloom this time

A few weeks later, I was back at the Arboretum hoping to catch the leaves coming out. The peony stalks had made their appearance, but there still wasn’t much else growing. (I finally figured out this year that tree peonies are bushes and herbaceous peonies are stalks that die/regrow each year. There are also Itoh or Intersectional peonies that are a cross between tree and herbaceous peonies.) The undergrowth was coming in and some leaves were budding, so I did end up getting a few pictures. Soon after this, we entered peony watch season, which is a whole other event in itself. More on that later.

Top left: peony stalks.  Top right: undergrowth starting to come in.

Bottom: leaves.

A Little Night Magic, part 1

To recap, as of the firings of Brad Friedel/Mike Burns, this is what the first half of the Revolution's season looked like:

The good:
1) Carles Gil.
2) Rookies DeJuan Jones and Tajon Buchanan looked promising at times.

The bad:
1) The rotating door of goalkeepers, in which the starter was either determined by Brad Friedel’s horoscope for the day or rock, paper, scissors.
2) The defense literally standing still while ostensibly defending.¹
3) Teal Bunbury’s (lack of) form.²
4) Subpar performances from the rest of the attacking line as well. It took 8 games before an attacking player not named Gil scored, and 9 games before a striker did.
5) So, basically everything. Hello, 2-8-2 record.

¹Seriously. 3 Revolution players in the six-yard box plus 4 more in the penalty area plus their goalkeeper against 3 Union players and they still can’t keep the ball out of the net.
²I’m not here to call out particular players, but Twitter actually has a #DammitTeal hashtag that I just learned followed him from Kansas City. And if you’ve got a stat called “number of shots that go out the opposite side of the field for throws ins,” you might be going a little more wrong than the rest of the team.

The reason everyone was surprised when Friedel and Burns were fired is that historically, the Krafts/Revolution have done very little in terms of coaching, player acquisition, and facilities to convince fans and the general public that they’re serious about soccer. After Steve Nicol, they hired former defender Jay Heaps, who was working for Morgan Stanley at the time and had no coaching experience. Heaps took the Revolution to the 2014 MLS cup, helped along by MLS’s first and last blind draw that sent USMNT player Jermaine Jones to New England. He did what he could with what he was given, but consecutive poor seasons in 2016 and 2017 led to his dismissal. Since that experiment ended so very well, the Revolution thought they’d try it again with Brad Friedel, former USMNT goalkeeper and general manager Mike Burns’ college roommate . . . who also had essentially no coaching experience.

Friedel never really seemed to get the Revolution to click. He also had a habit of throwing players under the bus during interviews, and reportedly lost the locker room and micromanaged his players during games by screaming at them to move two steps to the right. At least that’s what #NERevs Twitter says, but I can buy it based on player attitudes and the number of players who left the team unhappily. As for Burns, he served the club as a player, director of soccer, vice president of player personnel, and finally general manager, but by that point he had gained a reputation as the worst manager in MLS to work with, which is . . . not good.

With Friedel and Burns gone, this is where Mike Lapper comes in. This is where things get crazy again. Bruce Arena is hired shortly after the firings, but won’t be coaching for several weeks, so Lapper, Friedel’s assistant coach, is tasked with filling in until then. And in his first game, New England wins. They score, they defend, they look good doing it. They look . . . happy? Lapper wins over the fans, not just because the team has gotten a positive result, but because he genuinely seems like a nice guy that the Revolution enjoy playing for.

He follows the San Jose win up with ties on the road against Montreal (a road point that would have been at least a three-goal loss with a red card a week ago) and at home against DC United [a home point that probably should have been a home win, according to the Twitter outrage (I missed watching this game)]. He leaves the Revolution with a 1-0-2 record, undefeated in MLS play, to the dismay of fans.

Now enter Bruce Arena. Arena’s first game is on the road at the LA Galaxy, the very team he coached against the Revolution in their heartbreaking fifth MLS cup loss in 2014. I debated whether I should stay up for the game, because 7:30 pm California time is 10:30 pm Michigan time, and it was a Sunday night, but I decided to see how Arena’s first game would pan out. The Revolution proceed to show up to the game and outplay the Galaxy. Cristian Penilla has multiple shots on goal before he gets one (off a Carles Gil pass) into the goal. Gil picks up another assist when none other than #DammitTeal not only hangs on to the pass but also gets around his defender, puts the shot on frame, and scores. Turns out that’s the game-winning goal because Zlatan “I will break all the records”³ Ibrahimovic scores a pretty average bicycle kick goal to pull one back for the Galaxy.

³Most career red cards in MLS is 10. Better start fouling, Zlatan.

Instead of giving up a stoppage time goal on a corner kick, the Revolution weather the remaining minutes of the game plus stoppage time to secure their first win under Bruce Arena and go into the Gold Cup break 2-0-2 since Friedel was fired. Worth it to stay up past midnight watching soccer, because for the first time in months, it feels like the Revolution are playing for something.

#HereWeGoAgain

Back in March, MLS and the Revolution began their 24^th season of soccer. After multiple seasons of rebuilding and feeling like they could fall off the tracks at any time, the Revolution completely derailed with an abysmal 2-8-2 record to start the 2019 season. It started almost promisingly, with a road tie in Dallas to open the season, but that was followed by losses to Columbus, Toronto, and Cincinnati. They were outscored 8-3 in their first four games, and the only Revolution player to score was new signing Carles Gil who (spoiler alert) still looks really good halfway through the season.

In their last game of March, the Revolution finally picked up their first win of the season against Minnesota and looked semi-competent while doing so. Jalil Anibaba scored from service from Gil that New England’s been missing, and Brandon Bye spared Teal Bunbury from adding to his tally of shots that go out for throw ins [yes, throw ins, not goal kicks (he’s at three for the season)] by redirecting a wide shot into the back of the net. Alas, they followed that performance by losses to Columbus (again) and Atlanta before picking up their second win of the season against the Red Bulls. Cristian Penilla got his first goal of the season, and Cody Cropper registered the team’s first shutout.

And then here’s where things got really crazy. First, the Revolution travelled to Montreal to lose 3-0. Next, they travelled to Kansas City to get a 4-4 result in which newcomer Juan Fernando Caicedo got two goals, Bye was sent off for a second yellow card for a poorly thought out tackle, Sporting Kansas City (SKC) was awarded a weak penalty on a foul in the box, the Revolution were given a weak penalty five minutes later for a handball in the box, Gil missed the penalty, rookie DeJuan Jones scored on the rebound, former Rev Krisztian Nemeth scored a brace (side note – he looks good at SKC), and Anibaba was sent off for another unadvisable tackle. So the Revolution finished the game with four goals, nine men on the field, and a point.

They continued their time on the road at the Philadelphia Union and Chicago Fire, where they proceeded to underwhelm even the very underwhelmed Revolution fanbase’s expectations by losing 6-1 and 5-0 in a span of five days. The defense, instead of being simply bad, was awful. Paul Mariner, their color commentator, accused them of not doing things high school soccer teams know to do. The offense, instead of being simply anemic, was appalling. Getting shots on goal going three miles an hour straight at the goalkeeper was an accomplishment.

To the shock of the fanbase, instead of limping like a wounded animal to the end of the season, within a week they fired their coach Brad Friedel, fired longtime general manager Mike Burns, and hired Bruce Arena as head coach and sporting director. And this is where I’ll leave things off for now.

Winter semester+

The plus is because the semester officially ended at the beginning of May, but I’m going to recap until the end of May, because I’m writing at the beginning of June. So besides inadvisably trekking through the arboretum, I did a lot of other stuff.

I TA’d again, and in class related news, I had 44 students (up from 32 the previous year), and graded 8 problem sets (up from 7 previously) with 5 questions each, which amounts to 352 problem sets and 1,760 problems, plus/minus undone/incomplete assignments. There was also a midterm, that I graded entirely by myself, and a final, that I graded with my advisor immediately after the students finished taking it to get the class over with. I was required to had the pleasure of holding three office hours per week, for a total of 45 hours of instruction, plus/minus time spent on Reddit. When not grading, picking up work to be graded, returning graded work, or helping students with homework that I would later grade, I fielded emails, mostly about the homework, which, as you might know, I graded.

When I wasn’t fending off students, I was doing what I’m mostly paid to be doing, as in, research. I had meetings with my advisor a couple dozen times in five months, for an average of slightly more than one meeting per week. Since I was TA’ing for him and we sometimes have phone meetings with our collaborators, that’s pretty average for my research group. Also average for us is only having group meeting about every other week, enough for everyone to present once a semester. Near the end of the semester and into summer, we had three defenses in the span of five weeks. To celebrate, we had a lab party at our advisor’s house where we had dinner and played Pandemic and saved the world. As people prepared to graduate, the lab decided to become social and start drinking together.¹ We attended a few happy hours and also a Detroit Pistons game.

¹Drinking with my lab goes like this: We arrive at the bar between 5:30 and 6 pm. Half to two-thirds of the people present order a beer. A couple people order fries. A few more people order dinner food. We talk and finish our meals/single drinks. We leave before it’s dark out and are home by 8 pm.

Band continued as usual. We had our last sixteen rehearsals and three concerts of our fortieth season. The January concert featured overtures, including Malcolm Arnold’s “A Grand, Grand Overture” (for Three Vacuum Cleaners, One Floor Polisher, and Concert Band). Yes, really. I hadn’t played anything that fabulous since PDQ Bach’s “Grand Serenade for an Awful Lot of Winds and Percussion” my senior year of high school. In March, we had a joint concert with Measure for Measure, a men’s chorus founded by former UM glee club members. We played “Battle Hymn of the Republic” with them, and Shostakovich’s “Festive Overture” by ourselves. If you’re a band or orchestra person, you’ll know it if you hear it. Our final concert of the season was on Mother’s Day and to celebrate we played pieces by female composers, plus Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” with a UM music school professor.

The band at Hill Auditorium with Measure for Measure

(taken from Facebook)

Outside of band, I had the opportunity to play some clarinet music with people from church. For whatever reason, we seem to have an unusually high concentration of music school students, so a couple times so far, we’ve done informal concerts where the music students plus me play. In February I did a couple pieces from Lord of the Rings accompanied by harp, which was a first for me. Then in May I played the third movement from the Mozart clarinet concerto with piano accompaniment for the first time since high school. Both my accompanists were better than me, but I enjoyed myself and no one’s ears bled from my playing, so we’ll call it a success. It wasn’t all practicing and performing for me, though. Within a span of a week in April, I attended a harp recital, a piano recital, and a glee club concert. I saw the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra perform in January for Mozart’s birthday at the beginning of the semester, and after the end of the semester, I went to see the Detroit Symphony Orchestra play Hadyn's concerto for two horns and Brahms’s fourth symphony.

In April, I also went to see Avengers: Endgame on opening night, the first time I have ever seen a movie on opening night. In preparation, I had been watching the previous 20 movies, and I was happy with how they wrapped this phase of the MCU up. I brought musician’s earplugs that I had from pep band, which was a great decision because my brain did not hurt after three hours in the theater. I closed out this five-month stretch with a church Memorial Day picnic featuring barefoot soccer, Secret Hitler, and speed Scrabble. My feet were bruised for over a week, we spent all of Secret Hitler yelling at each other, and I can’t spell, but it was a great day. Now on to summer.

It’s All Greek to Me

You know you’re an engineer when you recognize Greek letters on fraternities because you’ve seen them in your classes, not the other way around. When you get that deep into math and science, sometimes English just doesn’t cut it, but if the whole point was to increase the number of possible variables, why does each Greek letter stand for five different things? See below, with notes on which fields you’d commonly find each definition in.

Γ – gamma function (math), Poynting factor (thermodynamics)
Δ – change (math)
Θ – wavefunction (math, quantum mechanics)
Λ – deBroglie wavelength (thermodynamics)
Ξ – one of the thermodynamic ensembles (thermodynamics)
Π – product (math)
Σ – summation (math)
Φ – dissipation (heat and mass transfer, fluids)
Ψ – wavefunction (math, quantum mechanics)

Ω – domain of integration (math), angular velocity (general science), thermodynamic 

       ensemble (thermodynamics)

Not used (they look like their English counterparts): Α, Β, Ε, Ζ, Η, Ι, Κ, Μ, Ν, Ο, Ρ, Τ, Υ, Χ

Here's where things get real fun:
α – kinetic energy correction factor (fluids), angle (math), heat diffusivity (heat and mass
      transfer)
β – angle (math), coldness (=1/k_bT; thermodynamics)
γ – specific weight (general science), activity coefficient (heat and mass transfer,
      thermodynamics), heat capacity ratio (thermodynamics, chemistry)
δ – distance (general science), delta function (math), Kronecker delta (δ_ij) (fluids, heat and
      mass transfer, quantum mechanics)
ε – molar absorptivity (chemistry), electromotive force (physics), electron charge (also
      physics, general science), permittivity of free space (hey, look, physics again), strain
      (fluids), permutation tensor (ε_ijk) (math, fluids), energy (general science), effectiveness
      (thermodynamics)
ζ – dimensionless breakage time (fluids)
η – dynamic viscosity (fluids), efficiency (thermodynamics)
θ – angle (math, general science)
κ – bulk modulus (fluids)
λ – wavelength (physics, general science), eigenvalue (math), distance (general science),
      mean free path (thermodynamics)
μ – dynamic viscosity (fluids), growth rate (biology), coefficient of friction (physics), chemical
      potential (thermodynamics), moment (physics), shear modulus (fluids), reduced mass
      (chemistry)
ν – kinematic viscosity (fluids), frequency (thermodynamics), stoichiometric coefficient
      (chemistry), microstate (thermodynamics), frequency factor (chemistry)
ξ – extent of reaction (chemistry), complex function (math), mesh size (fluids),
      nondimensional length (probably fluids)
π – 3.1415926535897932384626 (life), Henry’s law coefficient (thermodynamics, chemistry),
      dimensionless group (ChemE)
ρ – density (general science), mass concentration (heat and mass transfer)
σ – surface tension (fluids), standard deviation (math), stress tensor (fluids), stress (fluids),
      particle diameter (chemistry, kinetics), symmetry number (kinetics), Steffan Boltzmann
      constant (heat and mass transfer), resistivity (physics)
τ – torque (fluids), time (general science), deviatoric stress (fluids)
φ – probability function (math), characteristic function (math), polar angle (math), volume
      fraction (general science), benzene group (chemistry), fugacity coefficient
      (thermodynamics)
χ – mole fraction (ChemE)
ψ – wavefunction (math, quantum mechanics)
ω – angular velocity (general science), degeneracy of microstates (thermodynamics)
Not used: ι (looks like i), ο (looks like o), υ (no idea what this is)

ε and σ win for most definitions off the top of my head (8 each), with μ coming in second with 7 and φ in third with 6. Totally not confusing at all.