At the Library Again

In the over two years I've spent at Cornell, I have not studied at the library once. Over the summer, however, I did make use of the library to fill my free time by borrowing a number of books to read for fun. Apologies to more sensitive readers for using the f word.

Unfortunately, my experience was that the Cornell library system did not have every book I searched for. I guess the books I was looking for must have been extremely obscure or wildly unpopular. Probably both.

I got my book recommendations from online lists I stumbled upon and out of the books I managed to hunt down at Olin Library, I didn't hate any of them, but some were definitely better than others. Some of my favorites:

2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke) – I read the whole Odyssey series, but the first book was the best. I enjoyed the whole series, but if you’re not a big science fiction fan and/or don’t have time to read an entire series, at least read the first one. Although the movie shows up on multiple “Most Confusing Movies of All Time” lists (yes, I do spend too much time looking up random stuff on the internet), I didn't think the book was confusing at all.

Discworld, Terry Pratchett – There’s an entire series of Discworld books, and this summer I read the first two, The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. If The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (one of my favorite books) is science fiction humor, the Discworld books are fantasy humor. There was adventure, weird characters in a strange world, and utter ridiculousness.

Our Town, Thornton Wilder – The last play I read was The Importance of Being Earnest, in the spring of my junior year of high school. So it’s been awhile. I really liked the descriptions of life in a small New England town, probably because I did most of my growing up in a small-ish New England town.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell – Along with Brave New World and We (Yevgeny Zamyatin), Nineteen Eighty-Four is considered one of the most influential dystopian works. I have not read We, but I ended up liking Nineteen Eighty-Four more than Brave New World. There wasn't any particular glaring failure of Brave New World; I just like Nineteen Eighty-Four better overall.

It was a good summer in terms of books (and overall) and one of the reasons I wrote this post is because I forgot a picture in the last summer reading post I did. What trip to the library is complete without some penguins?

You know you’re a Cornell student when . . .

I’m back on campus for another thrilling year of the ChemE life. To kick things off, here’s how you know you’re a Cornell student:

- any distance less than a mile is “a quick walk”
- it’s perfectly normal to have a clock tower, a dairy, a thirty-foot climbing wall, and a 4,000 acre garden right on campus
- all. the. hills.
- you have a deep distaste of crimson

You know you’re an engineer when . . .
- you can’t remember the last time you were on the arts quad
- you know all your Greek letters but you've never taken a language class
- when you write lab reports, there are more words that spellcheck thinks are spelled incorrectly than words it recognizes
- you either have a prelim every week for ten weeks straight or three prelims in six days twice a semester
- you mentally draw free body diagrams/analyze chemical reactions/explain real life using things you learned in class that didn't seem relevant at the time

You know you’re a ChemE when . . .
- when you say Olin, you always mean Olin Hall, not Olin Library
- two hour recitations and prelims are normal (apparently, other majors don’t have weekly two hour recitations and normal prelims are one and a half hours)
- for fun, you complain about problem sets, non-engineering majors, writing, liberal studies classes, the temperature in Olin, the lines in the only all-you-can-eat dining hall on Central Campus, and the color of the sky, among other things
- you’ve been in Olin past midnight

Twas the Night Before Classes

Twas the night before classes, and all throughout campus

The students were stirring, raising a ruckus;
The textbooks were dropped on desks without care,
In hopes that the first day of school would not soon be there;

The students weren't nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of equations tormented their heads;
And ChemEs in the dorms, and I in my hat,
Had resigned our brains to wrestle with Schrodinger’s cat,

When out on the hill there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew in a flash,
And heard from below a thump and a crash.
The moon on the grass of the slope down below,
Set the hill and the trees and the campus aglow,
When what to my half-asleep eyes did appear,
But some drunk college students clutching bottles of beer.
Leaving my window with some things left unsaid,
I turned back to my room and tried to go back to bed.
But more rapid than thirty-second notes the equations they came,
And they stayed in my brain and I knew them by name:
Now Henderson, now Hasselbalch, now Navier and Stokes,
Now Bernoulli, and Maxwell, Reynolds and Helmholzt.
Explaining fluid flow, and acid concentrations,
There were laws and rules, formulas and relations.
And round my brain, the equations they flew
With their letters and symbols, and differentials too-
And then, in a twinkling, I heard in my head
Another voice saying, “Go back to bed.”
As I closed my eyes, and was falling asleep,
Slowly away the equations did creep.
But I heard them exclaim, ere they slipped out of sight,
“Happy semester to all, and to all a good night.”

The Last Days of Summer

As summer winds down, I’m preparing for the new things another semester always brings: new problem sets, new late night problem set homework sessions, new sleep deprivation, new drunk screaming neighbors, new levels of complete and utter failure, and the like. But before all that begins, I do have to say that I had a good summer. I hiked three of New York’s State Parks, biked around the Cornell Plantations, visited the Farmer’s Market, read for fun, spent some quality time with Hezekiah, mastered routes on the bouldering wall, and enjoyed Ithaca in summer. I also got blisters and bruises, was bitten by a couple dozen insects, and got rained on every other time I tried to leave Olin, but I’m willing to put all that aside for the greater good.

Last year I gave unasked for back to school advice. This year I’m here to talk about the evils of the corporate world having a job and working 9 to 5. In three words: don’t do it. You will slowly feel the life leaching out of you until one day you find yourself sitting at a table peeling dried glue off of your fingers and asking yourself “What is the meaning of life?”

Just kidding. I worked fifty-three days this summer designing fluid mechanics models without a full weekday off. In the end, we have a model ready to be built and three others in various stages of development to show for our work. It was totally worth it. I made enough money to cover my rent and food, gained design experience, and – dare I say it – had some fun every other week or so.

It was a different experience, working straight through the middle eight hours of the day, then getting back to the apartment after five and having absolutely nothing to do. No office hours, no problem sets, no parties. I went to sleep at 10:30 last night and woke up before seven voluntarily, then couldn't go back to sleep for the first time in months. I’m going to savor that moment, because it’s not going to happen again unless I switch into Arts and Sciences anytime this year.

So now that I have a few days off before classes start, how do I plan to use them? I have a couple things to wrap up to prepare for the school year, then I’m thinking I’ll get a few last books from the library to read for fun before all the books I pick up have Greek letters and chemical formulae in them, maybe go biking around campus. One thing I will not be doing: solving any fluids problems. Well, maybe just one . . .

Left Handers Day 2014

When I was a child, I was not ever forced to switch my dominant hand, but I was given approximately zero help in school, leading to an incorrect pencil/pen grip and long-lasting psychological problems. I also have a special place reserved in a deep fiery pit of hatred strong dislike for contoured right handed scissors. Because what I really wanted was to gouge out a chunk of my index finger while I hack ineffectively at lines that I can’t see so that I can glue together a picture of a pond habitat. Which is to say, I am left handed.

The Left Handers Day website covers information about the holiday and Anything Left Handed has more information about being left handed, including a selection of left-handed pens and pencils. If they weren’t at least five dollars per pen, I would probably hunt one down just for the heck of it. Yes, I am aware that five dollars isn’t that much, but I like to buy ten cent ballpoint pens because I’m cheap. Actually, most liquid ink pens smudge too much and pencil has too much friction and gets all over my hand. When I was in elementary school, sometimes when eating lunch after not washing my hands, I would get graphite marks on my sandwich. Tasty, and I’m sure all the added bacteria was also great for my health.

There are plenty of other places online with lists of famous left-handed people and things like that, so instead I’m going to discuss something about handedness and hockey that I unearthed in the middle of the last hockey season and one of my favorite Bible stories.

Sometime during hockey season, I was looking for information about a game on the opposing school’s website and noticed that they listed their players’ handedness on their roster. Rather than seeing a list of R’s like on baseball rosters, there were (very) roughly equal numbers of hockey players who were playing right and left handed. It turns out that in America it’s slightly more common for hockey players to be taught to have their dominant/stronger hand on the bottom of the stick while in Canada and probably the rest of the world it’s taught that the dominant hand should be on the top of the stick. While the former tends to have more power, the latter has more control. Either way, there’s about a 60-40 split between players shooting right and left handed. Which way the handedness leans depends on the country.

One of my favorite Bible stories was shared fairly recently, but in honor of Left Handers Day, I’ll share it again. It’s about Ehud, the left-handed judge. Ehud is raised up by God to help the people of Israel, who are being oppressed by the king of Moab, Eglon. One day, Ehud goes to the king’s palace with tribute for Eglon. After presenting the tribute, he tells the king that he has a secret message for him. He is only checked for weapons on his left side and is allowed to meet privately with the king. At that point, Ehud pulls out his dagger from the right side and stabs the king in the stomach. The king’s entrails fall out and Ehud goes home, where he gathers the Israelites to go kill ten thousand Moabites. Then there are eighty years of peace.

Moral of the story: Don’t trust left-handed people bearing secret messages Celebrate Left Handers Day every August 13th.