The Roommate Triangle Reunites

I’ve spent 36 months in Ann Arbor. For the first 34 of those months, the only people who visited me were related to me. At the end of June, I doubled my visitor count when most of my closest friends from Cornell all decided this summer would be a good time to come to Michigan. The first group included one of my suitemates from junior year, my junior year roommate, and my senior year roommate. My junior and senior year roommates lived together during their sophomore year, hence the roommate triangle.

Since they were only coming for a long weekend, I didn’t want to spend a lot of time driving across the state, so we mainly stayed in the Ann Arbor area. (Plus, they wouldn’t definitively tell me what they wanted to do, leaving me to plan the itinerary.) Our first full day in Ann Arbor, we went into the downtown/central campus area to see some of the university and visit the free museums. We parked by the library and made our way to the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) via the library and Cherry Republic. The art museum isn’t huge, but it’s also not as small as you might think. There’s an old wing and a new wing that was completed in 2009. Both wings are generally organized by type/location of art (i.e. modern art, Asian art, etc.), and there’s a good variety (so not twenty-seven rooms all filled with portraits of European royalty in the 1600s). Some highlights include Tiffany doors/windows, swords, a few Picasso pieces (modern art), and the old building itself (it’s a nice building, okay?). After about an hour, we moved on to the Museum of Natural History.

Tell me this isn't a nice building.

The Museum of Natural History semi-recently moved from their old building into the new Biological Sciences building. The main exhibits opened in April, and the remaining exhibits will open in November. I never made it to the natural history museum in their old location, but the new building is nice. Like the art museum, it’s not huge, and can be covered in about an hour. When you enter, you’re greeted by two mastodons. Besides them, the first floor also has a café, a short film about Michigan natural history, an exhibit on time/length scaling, and the planetarium, which costs money. The main exhibit, on the second floor, is Evolution: Life through Time. It’s like a smaller version of the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca, and the Field Museum in Chicago also has a similar exhibit. Basically, you’re walked through lots of fossils and bones that progress from worm-things and trilobites to funny-looking fish to dinosaurs to chickens and walruses. It’s not as extensive as either the Museum of the Earth or the Field Museum, but it’s still well done. Right now, the only other things on the second floor are a bunch of rocks and minerals [there are some pretty cool ones – petrified wood, the minerals that are different colors depending on their impurities, fulgurite (it’s formed by lightning)] and just your friendly neighborhood Quetzalcoatlus.

Mastodons at the entrance

Following our afternoon enjoying the free air conditioning, we headed back off campus to the Main Street/downtown Ann Arbor area for dinner. We ate at Frita Batidos, my first time there since moving to Ann Arbor. They serve Cuban-inspired burgers (fritas) and milkshakes (batidos). The milkshakes are really good (particularly with rum – yes, that’s an option), but to spare my stomach and wallet, I only ordered a chorizo frita this time (no churros either).

Quetzalcoatlus

Our last activity for the day was an escape room, the one request for an activity I got, besides eating, which we did plenty of as well. I’d never done an escape room, but I do have a slight puzzle solving compulsion, so I was definitely interested. The goal in the room we did was to escape from a desert island, which we did with some minutes left. We did end up getting a couple clues, one to start us off and one because something we thought should open wouldn’t open but it turns out it did open after all. Overall, I thought the room was well-designed. The puzzles made sense and didn’t require any “of course you should have known to stand on your head and spin around three times to make the palm tree start talking” logic. Would recommend if you like puzzles. And that wrapped up day one. Stay tuned for the rest of the weekend.

Peonies are Pink

Late May in Ann Arbor means two things: 1) The grad students are settling into summer and 2) It’s peony watch time at the Arboretum. After a hectic semester in the lab, we welcomed the chance to sit down and get some research done without the distractions of seminars, office hours, grading, homework, classes, and 5 million emails every day. While we (finally) got some work done, the greyness of winter and spring slowly crept away, the temperatures inched upward, and plant life started to return to Ann Arbor. This year, thanks to an abnormally cool and rainy spring, the peonies were over a week late, but after multiple trips to the Arboretum, I eventually caught them in full bloom.

After all, what’s the point of having a fancy camera if you don’t go take fancy pictures with it? As an added bonus, this year it was cloudy and overcast on the day I visited during peak bloom, giving me great diffuse lighting. The first summer I spent in Ann Arbor, I accidentally showed up at the Arboretum after work one day when the peonies were in bloom. Because it was evening, the light was decent, but at that time I only had my point and shoot camera. Last year, I took my mother to see the peonies while she was visiting. We went in the middle of the afternoon, and it had been cloudy, but cleared soon after we arrived so that the garden was in full sunlight. Bad for the un-suncreened and photographers alike. I had my DSLR and got some okay pictures, but there were also a lot of blown out highlights and details hidden in shadows.

When I finally got my peony pictures this year, I came away with some shots that I’m pretty happy with. The lighting was good and I even got a few cool pictures where the background is blacked out but the peonies aren’t. Normally, to get this effect on purpose, you can use flashes to light your subject and use a fast shutter speed to only pick up light from the flash and not ambient light (explained here, used at a convention here). In this case, I semi-accidentally had this happen because the light-colored peonies in particular were still picking up a lot of indirect sunlight while the stalks behind them were not. This meant that the difference in exposure was significant (3 or 4 stops? More?) and exposing for the flowers left the background extremely underexposed and black. That’s your photography lesson for the day; the peonies are below:

A Little Night Magic, part 2

The magic of the US Open Cup is that hypothetically, any soccer team in the United States could win it. In reality, the only non-division one team to ever win is the 1999 Rochester Rhinos, but the possibility is there, and weird things happen every year. Last year, the Revolution under Brad Friedel crashed out in the first round where MLS teams entered the bracket (round 4 overall). Not only did they lose after assuring fans they were taking the Open Cup very seriously, but they did so to a lower division team. This year, they once again assured fans they were taking the Open Cup very seriously (every team does this every year), and (spoiler alert) did not lose in the first round to the New York Red Bulls.

They looked like they were going to lose. It started off well enough, with Juan Agudelo scoring in just the second minute to put the Revolution up a goal early. After that, besides a Juan Fernando Caicedo shot off the crossbar, they didn’t threaten the Red Bulls much while allowing two goals, one on either side of halftime. However, they didn’t roll over and give up, their standard mode of operation after surrendering leads during the past couple years. They stayed organized and didn’t look desperate, which usually leads to them pressing too high and too hard, rushing passes, shooting like they’re aiming for the next county, and letting the other team run up the score.

They still couldn’t get the tying goal, and things looked like they were on the way from bad to worse when Jalil Anibaba fouled a Red Bulls player in the box. Penalty kick awarded with no hesitation from the ref. But then. The Red Bulls player steps up to the ball. Takes the shot. And Matt Turner makes the save.¹ Game on. The Revolution keep playing their game, and in the eighty-fifth minute, Teal Bunbury brings down a pass from Wilfried Zahibo nicely. His first touch takes him inside the defender. His shot doesn’t go out for a throw in, it’s on frame, and in fact it rolls nicely into the back of the net. Just like that, the game is tied and goes into extra time, but not before Luis Caicedo picks up a second yellow card in second half stoppage time, because otherwise this wouldn’t be the Revolution.

Somehow the Revolution come out of the break looking okay. There’s some truth that teams playing down a man are hard to break down because everyone defends more, so there is hope that they’ll take the game to penalty kicks. But this is the Open Cup, so in the 109th minute, Bunbury (yes, him again), collects a bad turnover from the Red Bulls and takes off down the left sideline. There’s a defender with him, and another defender makes it back to help out as Bunbury has the ball in the corner of the box. Neither defender moves to take the ball away from him. Naturally, he decides to chip the ball in between them both and over the goalkeeper to score the game-winning goal and send New England to the next round of the Open Cup. They would lose to Orlando in extra time the next week, ending their 2019 Open Cup run, but that night in New Jersey was a little bit of the magic the Revolution have been missing.

¹The last time Turner made a penalty kick save was the 2018 home opener against Colorado. In that game, his save maintained a 1-1 game so that Chris Tierney, coming on as a substitute late in the game, could score the game-winning goal on a stoppage time free kick. It was Tierney’s last goal or assist as a Revolution player. Two months later, he tore his ACL, and retired at the end of the season. [Tierney is from Wellesley, MA, was selected in the 2008 Supplemental Draft, and played his entire eleven-season career for the Revolution. He was best known for his left foot and scoring the late goal in the 2014 MLS cup final against the Galaxy that sent the game into extra time. The fans like him.]

Out on the Town

[May 2019]
Last post from spring, then we can start talking about early summer. Actually, the only reason for this post is to show off some architecture photos from my wanderings across campus. I’m not an architectural photographer and I’m still shooting on my kit lens, so no super wide-angle facades, zoom lens details, or tilt-shift. Here are some buildings:

 North Campus quad with the Duderstadt Center in the background.

Also known as the Dude, the building houses the Art, Architecture, and Engineering Library.

Interesting combination, but the three schools located on North Campus are the School of Music, Theatre & Dance (ampersand and no Oxford comma according to their site), the College of Architecture & Urban Planning (again with the ampersand), and the College of Engineering.

Mosher-Jordan Hall.

The internet tells me that this is a first-year mixed-gender residence hall.

Kinesiology Building.

I don’t know what this building is used for, but the School of Kinesiology is moving into the Natural Science Building, currently under renovation, in 2020.

The Natural Science Building was originally finished in 1915 and was home to Botany, Geology, Minerology, Zoology, Psychology, and more.

The Henry Frieze Vaughan Public Health Building.

Who was Henry Frieze Vaughan?

An American epidemiologist born in Ann Arbor in 1889 to Dora Catherine Taylor Vaughan and Victor C. Vaughan, M.D., the 4th of 5 children. Thanks Wikipedia.

Hill Auditorium, site of band/orchestra/chorus concerts, with Burton Memorial Tower behind.

The tower contains the Charles Baird Carillon¹, which, despite having over double the number of bells as the Cornell Chimes¹ in McGraw Tower (53 to 21), doesn’t seem to play anything half as recognizable.

¹Carillons have at least 23 bells; chimes have less than 23.

Rackham Building.

Rackham is the graduate school that generally oversees the masters/PhD programs.

Everything else² was under construction.

²Not really. Everything else was either under construction, I couldn’t get a good, unimpeded head-on view of the building, the building looked boring, or I didn’t take a picture of that building for any one of seventeen thousand other reasons.

Sportsball [Detroit Pistons]

[March 2019 (another post from spring)]

Once in a while, my research lab decides to do something social beyond eating lunch together at the tables thirty feet from our office and sharing memes. I think this idea started because we were talking about bad sports teams (hi, Revolution) and cheap tickets. In particular, cheap tickets for games when two middling to bad teams that nobody cares about play each other on a weeknight. My coworker mentioned that Detroit Pistons (basketball) tickets would probably be pretty cheap, and when we looked, we found a Thursday night game against the Orlando Magic. Two mediocre teams? Check. Lukewarm fanbases? Check. Weeknight? Check. Cheap tickets ($14)? Check. Time for a lab excursion.

We put out the call on Facebook and ended up with 9 interested parties, a decent fraction of the lab. So after work on the determined day, we set off for Detroit. Traffic was light, street parking was reasonably easy to find, and getting into the stadium took less than five minutes. Our cheap seats were up in the balcony, but basketballs are big enough that you can sit in the back of the balcony and still see the ball and follow the game. Same for soccer, but if you ever go to a baseball or hockey game and want to actually, you know, watch the game, maybe pay a little extra to not sit in row ZZZ of the Skydeck, or whatever it is they’re calling the fourth balcony.

View from our seats

As for the game itself, the Pistons led basically the whole time, which wasn’t super exciting, but my blood pressure can always use a break from the Revolution. And sometimes it is nice to see a comfortable win from the team you’re rooting for. Besides the Revolution, I’ve sat through some rather painful sports games courtesy of Cornell athletics and my high school football team. Though I do kind of wish I could have seen the football game between Columbia and Cornell where they were playing to be the team that didn’t finish Ivy League play 0-8. Cornell won that game 3-0. Yes, this was an American football game.

We didn’t have anyone sitting in the row in front of us, so we had almost unimpeded views, we could see the ball, and the game was decent. They had cheerleaders doing routines during the breaks, which was not the real reason I went to the game. The only thing I regret is not bringing my earplugs, because the speakers were right by our heads blasting the whole time. Other than that, for ease of access, cost, and an overall pleasant experience, I’d go to Little Caesar’s Arena for a basketball game again.