Done

Two days ago, after one last flurry of final exams and get-togethers, my brother and I packed up my stuff and I left Case for the last time as an undergraduate. The degree is promised to arrive at some point next month in the mail, though I was unsuccessful in my petition of having it converted into radians.

I confess leaving my university and home for the past 4.5 years has been difficult- even now it feels like I'll just be heading back soon after winter break, and my sister assures me I'll feel the same right up to next fall when I realize I'm heading somewhere else. We'll see what that new place will be like, once I learn just where it is, but all I know is it will be very difficult to find another place where it's natural to be on first-name terms with all your professors, where even the dean and department chair show up for your parties, and the university president knows who you are. Being personable never hurt but still, I worked my way quite nicely into that community and feel a bit left out already for leaving it.

But there we are. As a final note, I am happy to say that I got all As for the first time ever (as in, I think a B always slipped in even in elementary school) except this time there were things like upper-level English classes and graduate-level physics ones, so we can argue just how much sense this makes. But to quote my research adviser, "Congratulations. You've achieved perfection just in time to move on."

I was always impressed by how that guy can see through everything I've been working on to say what I should do next, all in an instant. Time to move on. I'll let you guys know where I end up.

Quarked: Campus Mysteries

Here is the most recent installment of Quarked, which covers a variety of things I have noticed around campus that I never quite figured out and figure I probably won't by this point. I'm not sure how entertaining some of the things are to those who don't know my university, but I write for a campus newspaper and figured I should cover a few more 'local' things as well.

Entertainingly enough, this column is not without controversey, due to the following passage-

Inscription plaque in Rockefeller - Our physics building was built in 1906,
but if you actually look at the dedication plaque, (between the two sets of
doors as you're coming in from the Quad) the dedication date for the building is
written as "MDCCCCVI." This is, of course, not the way you write Roman numerals
- you use subtraction notation, meaning you can only have three of anything in a
row and 1906 should actually be written "MCMVI."

I don't know what is more disturbing, the fact that the physics department doesn't know how to count, or the fact that I am the first person in over 100 years who has noticed this.

As it turns out, there is some controversey as to when exactly Roman numerals were "standardized" as we use them today- the Romans liked to use "IIII" for 4 instead of "IV" like we do due to superstition, but were fine with "IX" for example. Long story short, I now know more about this than I cared to know.

I mention this because it turns out some people writing to point out errors are not as nice as others, and one went as far as saying "the physics department is owed an apology by the snarky columnist." I always thought I was more curmudgeonly myself... Anyway, this led me to wonder who exactly I'd apologize to should anyone care. Myself? My friends, my professors, or my friends who are professors? The department chair who has shown up to my parties?

This is why letters to the editor are funny, by the way. They can take one person's opinion and totally blow it out of proportion so you'll remember it a long time even when everyone else has long forgotten the incident at hand.

VOTE

I am not one to beg you to go vote only to get pissed if you don't vote for the person I want to win. I just want you to vote, as it is your duty and privilege to do so.

If you want brownie points check your local state's League of Women Voters page and get informed on the other things also on your state ballot. There's usually some other important stuff in there worth your attention!

And finally, for fun, as a few of you know I was an election official (aka poll worker) in the 2004 election. Cuyahoga County still did punch card ballots in 2004- we do paper ballots that look like the bubble sheets you use for standardized tests now- but it was one of the more unique experiences I've ever had. No time to do it this year again, unfortunately, I wrote a summary that I have dug up in honor of this anniversary:

Well the first thing to note about being a poll worker is it's rather
tiring or at least it was this time around. In my precinct we had all
told 466 votes cast whereas four years ago the same precinct saw 188
voters! Yep, we were one of the ones that had a line outside an hour
before the polls even opened and didn't let down from utter
pandamonium for about four hours after opening (here meaning a long
line that made voting maybe a half hour affair). We were relatively
uneventful compared to other precints in the ward however: some of the
other precints had a few dead people show up to vote! Which later led
to an animated discussion on just what we'd say if a dead person
showed, I was for "oh, you must not be feeling well, why don't you go
back home and lie down for awhile" but we never had to actually do
anything.

I was by far the youngest poll worker which means to start off with I
was in charge of tearing stubbs off the punch cards and putting
ballots in the ballot box etc to make sure that didn't get messed up.
I was also, as the only non-Democrat in the place being of "no party,"
the automatic Republican who had to be the second witness whenever
someone needed help in reading the ballot and such.

Later on in the day I got to keep the books and I was deemed "good at
it" (when my mom heard this she laughed- apparently on her father's
side there's a long line of bookkeepers) so I had to make sure the
signatures equalled the number of ballots cast etc etc. Rather
irritating when you realize you are ten off after counting all those
signatures and the only way to check is count them all again!

But I gotta admit, it was incredibly exciting last night to realize
that Ohio was going to decide the fate of the nation! And it made me
proud to realize that as far as Cuyahoga County 9-N goes there's no
grey area between what "should have" happened and what actually did.
Don't know how this election will go down in the books but I have the
feeling that down the line the fact that I was an Ohio poll worker for
Election 2004 will be a story for the grandkids.

Prelude to Winter

I take a lot of pictures that never make it to this blog (usually because I don't get them off my camera until their timeliness is questionable) but I noticed this set in my archives and they look lovely enough to share-
Date: March 5, 2008. We'd had a spate of freezing rain the night before, so despite the fact that it was practically springtime every single thing on campus was covered in a coating of ice, as if it was being prepared for display in a museum. For further proof, here's what the traffic light looked like on my usual route-
One of the funny things about winter, I think, is how I look at these pictures now and am utterly amazed by them but back when I took them no one even thought it was extraordinary at all. You consider the concept of shorts and t-shirts extraordinary, in contrast to how you can't imagine life in summertime without. All in all it says a good deal about human adaptability.

(Posted because today was the first day I needed to wear my winter hat with the giant pouf ball and my gloves, as the wind chill whilst bicycling required it, but two days ago I was still in shorts. Which made me start thinking about how it's probably the end of any warm weather I will see in Cleveland, which is a somewhat disturbing thought...)

Fun in the Snow

We had another snowstorm yesterday here in Cleveland, but what made this one interesting was how the temperature was very near freezing, making the snow ideal packing snow. So while we got several inches the snow sculptors have been out, and some of the results are really great! So last night, after a physics department mixer in a nearby coffeehouse, me, my friend Nick, and Dan Akerib, a friend and incidentally chair of the department, took a few minutes after the caffeinated chatting to take a look around.
First stop: an igloo! I'd never seen one in person before and here it was, in the part of the field usually reserved for volleyball in warmer seasons, and it was pretty darn sturdy (Dan's in the picture for scale). The only question that remained was if we could actually fit inside as the builders were nowhere to be seen...
Answer: yep, the three of us could fit quite nicely.

Nick: (after the fact) You realize we were just in an igloo with the chair of the physics department?
Me: That sounds like some sort of code for something.

Nick also mentioned to me that last year when I was in New Zealand some enterprising students built an igloo that could sleep seven: five on the ground floor and two on the first floor (naturally they tested it one night). Last year they got a LOT more snow though.

Near the igloo there was this nice chap sitting on a bench, so Nick decided to keep him company. There was also another similar gent sitting on a bench closer to the main pathway, but unfortunately some vandals had gone in and smashed him up...
Last but not least, the snow dragon! Ah! He really was a marvel, and one of the art students spent a good amount of time working on him. I'm hoping the student later went back to add a hump or two but haven't gone to check.

There are a few other sculptures that popped up today but I didn't have my camera on me. The campus is a bit more unique, though, which I think is great because winter gets pretty unbearable otherwise this time of year.

Brrrrr

The mercury is currently at 8F (-13C) with windchill at -15F (-26C), and the sun just set so we're looking at even colder temperatures tonight. Wouldn't be quite so terrible but the wind is blowing, and whenever the wind blows in Cleveland it starts snowing, so it's windy and snowy and all in all this makes me wonder why I was silly enough to not go to school someplace like Arizona.

The good thing about bad weather though is it forces you to stay inside and study, which I'm doing a decent amount of because I'm going to my first-ever scientific conference later this week in Boston (more on this later). And I just checked, it's about 30 degrees warmer in Boston and they don't get lake effect snow (obviously) so while there's something wrong with thinking you'll go to Boston to thaw out that's the truth this time around!

The Old College Try in Gardening

I'm going to start this off with the disclaimer that I am not much of a plant person. Really. If you want to meet a plant person you should introduce yourself to my mother, who is the sort of person who knows the name of every plant you'd ever come across and goes on about them the same way I am capable of going on about stars. During my childhood it was a given that my mom would carefully nurse a stray plant or two from wherever we were so she could replant them at home, customs be dammed, and that we'd need to set aside a day to visit the local botanical garden. Trust me, there is no way I will ever count as a plant person in comparison to my mother.

But regardless of the extent of my green thumb some of those genes certainly passed over, and compared to the average college denizen I am a plant person. Here's what my motley little garden looks like-

In the back, the big one in the middle is an African violet with pretty purple flowers, the one on the right is a crawling ivy that grows incredibly quickly, and the one on the left is a potted palm that I got at the poster/plant sale at the beginning of the year. (I called my mom up at the time to see what she'd suggest. "Get the palm," she recommended, "because they've been around for millions of years, so it will be hard for you to kill anything that evolved to be so tough.") The front row seats next to the window are given to the pepper plants I grew from seeds acquired at the cafeteria of all places- I started the one on the right at the end of August, and the two on the left in early October.

The next immediate question, of course, is what's with that odd-looking shelf they're sitting on? Originally the plants were all sitting on that windowsill in the picture but they kept getting knocked off when I closed the curtains, so I decided to build a nice shelf for them a few weeks ago. I, ahem, commandeered the wood from the discarded scrap in the physics shop which is why it has holes in it- beggars can't be choosers! For the legs I raided my bookcase, which is filled with these lovely thick physics textbooks that I need to hold onto but only use for reference perhaps once a semester, in which case I can temporarily dismantle said shelf until I find what I need and then reassemble it. All in all this works great on two levels because it leaves much-needed free space on my bookshelf and allows me to quickly disable it when it comes time to move out (because when you move around as much as I do, a concrete piece of furniture is the last thing you need!).

So that's the current plant situation in my room. I might add one or two when the second semester starts (a cactus would be nice, and I used to have this wicked red clover...) because once the snow really flies a bit of green is always appreciated.

Chalking it Up (part 2)

I just realized that I never posted chalkings from the second day of the chalk festival two weekends ago, and since a lot of you never got a chance to visit it'd be best if I posted them. So these are from Day 2 of the chalking extravaganza outside the Cleveland Art Museum...The above is a little map I did as my first chalking of the day on Sunday (I posted Saturday earlier). I spend a surprising amount of time looking at maps thanks to Ham radio so I wanted to see how well I could get away with the US from memory... not too bad overall I think, though the southern border needs some work.
After that I had an urge to draw something really, really colorful, so what was better than a peace sign? After all, not there's always a slight lack of it in the world...
These are my three drawings overall, plus some of the tools I used. Notice that the peace symbol really stands out compared to everything else- this is because you usually use a sponge to smooth out the colors, but I instead used the "wear down the chalk" approach instead on that one. Clearly, it works better, but only for smaller pictures because else you'd run out of the stuff.
This was the chalking of the guy who was working next to me, which was really cool because I got to see how the drawing evolved as he made it. Note that the source of light in the prism isn't clear- it's intended so that it could be coming either from the book or from outside sunlight.
This was a two-day effort by two ladies who were also in my general area. Looks just gorgeous!
Just another one I thought was lovely.
So much great work! This is one of the ones made by a professional artist, but I still felt really out of my league with all the great talent around... Unfortunately, we did get rain a few days ago in Cleveland so most of the chalkings are probably gone, but some of them might still be visible. I'll have to go check.

Chalking it Up

Today was a fun day! Gorgeous weather to counter those hurricane remnant clouds passing through last night, so I headed over to the 18th annual Chalk Festival hosted by the Cleveland Museum of Art. It's ongoing all this weekend (Sunday's hours are 12-5) and the artwork will last until the next rainfall, so you should all go check it out as it's really awesome.

As you can see, most of the people who participate are just families from Cleveland and such- you can pay for a certain-sized square and they'll give you some fine-quality chalk, so you can just get to work on doing whatever you want. There are also a few professional artists working too-
But yes, lots of creative chalkers! Here's one I particularly liked, titled "Snakes on a Plane"...
Here's another gorgeous set, which honestly look for all the world like a few Monet paintings just walked out of the art museum and laid themselves on the pavement-
Here's another nice one, which is clearly a work in progress and wont' be finished until tomorrow. A lot of people get really serious about the chalk festival, and are there the whole weekend. (For those who don't recognize it, the building is Adelbert, the CWRU administrative building where the president and provost and all those lovely people hang out.)
After seeing all this great artwork, I decided to throw my lot in the ring and do my own chalking. I was a bit intimidated by the other artists to be honest- I can't draw most things at all, and forever envy those who do- but I do have a good cartoonish style of many a deep space object thanks to years of doodling in my notebook margins and having a one-track mind. So after two hours, here's my end result-
Hooray for the Mars rover! This is probably the biggest piece of artwork I've ever done by the way- here's a picture with me in it for scale-
So anyway, I am quite proud of my piece and now get to obsessively worry about the prospects of rain for a little while (luckily we're in that time of year with perpetual blue skies, so it says "sunny" for the next ten days of forecast!). I had a lot of fun though and still have quite a bit of chalk, so perhaps tomorrow I'll be heading back to do another square. And if I don't, no one will complain too loudly if I use my meager artistic skills on some other nice piece of sidewalk around campus, right?