Snow Days

The weather has calmed in Telluride, and the past few days have been filled with warm "spring skiing." Gorgeous views all around all the way to Utah; I will have great fun sorting through my pictures once I'm at home...

One odd thing this year about skiing by the way is how much greater the avalanche worries are compared to years past around the American West because of how quickly most of the snow has fallen in most areas. Usually this is something you usually hear about only in the backcountry and not actual ski resorts, but within the past week one skier was killed at Jackson Hole and another at Squaw Valley (Tahoe), prompting many "good thing we didn't go there this year!" comments from us. (Only second to the "good thing we didn't go to Whistler!" comments on the chairlift thanks to their recent gondola accident.) Telluride hasn't been immune either- our first day here a skier got buried up to his chest in a small avalanche!

Turns out avalanches are really bad for ski resort PR, so as a result this has mainly effected us by how slow some parts of the mountain have been to open its brand new area, Revelation Bowl, because it's above the treeline so the snow has a nasty habit to "slip." After days of hearing charges explode the area finally opened yesterday, which promptly became mogoled (ie bumpy) within hours because everyone wanted their chance at the Bowl. So goes the skier's life, but it beats getting buried!

Alright, that's all I have for now. Except excitingly enough, I saw a porcupine in the middle of a trail today. He looked like my brother when he hasn't bothered combing his hair.

Little Town in the Box Canyon

Because the family that skis together stays together, my family is spending our Christmas holiday in Telluride, Colorado. We're here because Telluride is our favorite ever since we came here four years ago- it's in remote southwestern CO so there are never any lift lines, the mountain has great varied terrain, and the town is exactly what you'd expect out of one in the West where a large fraction of people are still trying to eck out a living. And seeing as this is our 20th year of skiing as a family (we first visited Vail when I was 3, during my dad's spring break in his professor days) trust me, when we say we have a favorite there's experience to back it up!

Today I took an off day to work on graduate school applications due to the cold (1 degree Farenheit when I woke up, aka -17C!), but the weather's looking promising from here on out- particularly fine as our first few days here consisted of snowstorms, as Telluride has gotten ~50" of snow in the past two weeks.

Promise to be back here to post pictures later as the one above is cheating- it's actually from four years ago, but I figure the scenery doesn't change right? (Apologies for the sizing, as the public library here in town doesn't seem to agree with blogging.)

Booked!

My favoritest YouTube video ever-

Shared because I finally purchased the first legs for my round the world trip today, set to begin on January 20 with a flight to Tokyo (and continue for six months through Southeast Asia, Europe, and Southern Africa). Psych!

More on this once my brain fully wraps around the implications of what I just did, but until then I will leave you with the translation of the song in the video above, which was sung in Bengali-

Stream of Life
by Rabindranath Tagore

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth
in numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth
and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.
And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

Lounging Around

After a hectic goodbye from California, I am taking a break this week in New Hampshire before the semester starts next week. And clearly I am spending it well- as everyone knows, no vacation is perfect without reading old paperback novels while lounging on the back of a giant inflatable killer whale...

I found the killer whale (promptly dubbed "Willy," of course) two summers back when he washed up on our shore after a big storm. No one came around to claim him after a few days, at which point informal lake rules decreed him as ours and I realized how much my life was missing in the pre-whale days. Ah, this life of busily doing nothing is a good one.

Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair

I'm sure most of you have had this cross your mind by this point, but there's a huge international city just an hour's drive north of me that I haven't written about. And it's probably high time I changed that, so without further ado...

Jill and I came back from the array last week very late on a Friday night- so late that the train back to Mountain View was really not feasible, so I ended up spending the night at her house in Berkeley. This worked out rather well, honestly, because I had to go through San Francisco anyway to get back to Mountain View. Even better, the Fisherman's Wharf Hostel had a bunk and breakfast for under $30 for Saturday night- quite a steal in a metropolis like this- so I nabbed it. And with that, I had a whole weekend in San Francisco.
First stop, cable car! I just happened to come out of the subway to find a cable car waiting with no tourists swarming around it, which I found fascinating in itself because the lines for the Fisherman's Warf- Union Square cable car often wrap around the block due to sheer tourist numbers. But as it turns out, cable cars in San Francisco are a lot less crowded on the other routes, and as an additional benefit this one ran all the way to Van Ness, the first street I needed to get to the hostel. Really not a difficult decision...

Also unlike the heavily touristed line, here there was plenty of room to either sit down or stand, but I was warned in advance that standing was more fun. And I agree with that...
Once I made it to the hostel, it was immediately obvious that it was the right decision to make. The Fisherman's Wharf Hostel is actually one of the more famous ones in the world with good reason- it's located in the park that stretches all the way from Fisherman's Wharf to the Golden Gate Bridge, specifically in an old barracks building of Fort Mason. And I mean, damn. The next time you stay in one of the biggest cities in the world in a gorgeous park with a view like this right outside the window and the rest of the city within walking distance, all for just a few dollars, let me know.
Now perhaps you noticed in the Golden Gate Bridge picture that there were a lot of sailboats. And there's actually good reason for that- I just happened to catch the Sailing Festival happening in the bay that weekend. The best part of it, though, were these two old vessels (shown while crossing in front of Alcatraz- whose touristic intrigue I never quite understood but whatever). When I first spotted them I thought they were just having a nice romp around the bay, but pretty soon some loud booming noises made me pay more attention. If you looked really closely you could see that one boat was flying a US flag and another the Jolly Roger- and there were wisps of smoke originating from the deck, meaning they were firing at each other. Sweet!

They carried out their mock battle for quite awhile, but I don't know who won. For whatever reason, I don't think they wanted to sink one of the ships.
After unwinding by watching the sailboats in the harbor, it was time for a walk. (Which is, it should be mentioned, what I did most of the weekend. Hills be dammed, I walked through most of the city of San Francisco.) After a quick jaunt to and away from Fisherman's Wharf to say I'd been I sort of walked with vague direction that happens when you know the geography of a city but are too lazy to have a map, admiring the views. This isn't the most advisable of methods, of course, because then you'll do something like walk up Lombard Street just because you'll think it's fun to walk down it.
The iconic view of Lombard Street, complete with the perpetual cloud of tourists taking pictures. Mind, I walked up the other, steeper side of the hill where the cars were backed up a fair bit just so they could come down this windy stretch- and it should be noted that here the cars park in the street perpendicularly to the curb rather than parallel, and EVERYONE'S wheels point into the curb. Anything less would be just plain silly.
A house on Lombard Street which I liked just because, well, look at how the guy's car is parked in the driveway. I'm pretty sure most places having your car parked on a tilt like that would result in some concern, but here the guy's just happy that he gets to get a great view in one of the prettiest cities in the world.

I've decided, by the way, that if I had a choice I would live on top of Lombard Street- the view can't be beat, and you would definitely always be in good shape. I might have to wait a little on that though, as even a tiny slip of a house here goes for millions of dollars.
What I happen to think is one of the best street names in the world. It was in Little Italy. I went there for dinner and happened to choose a place where they put a little free dish of little European vanilla-flavored tea cookies for desert. I consumed said little cookies in copious quantities as a child, so they did not go unappreciated.

After that it was getting dark, meaning time to head back to the hostel because wandering around in the dark in a strange city isn't the smartest of moves. I was fine with it though as spending the entire day walking does get you tired, and everyone knows it's fun to talk to fellow travelers in a hostel. (In case anyone is curious, it should be noted that the Germans were the dominant crowd I came across at least. I'm thinking they're fans of the current exchange rate.)

The next morning, after discovering with delight that the free breakfast included waffles, I poked my head outside. Definitely typical San Francisco weather, but not as nice as yesterday-
Guess the sailboats didn't mind, as they were still out, but fog doesn't exactly leave you brimming with an urge to sit and watch. And because the bus stop was nearby and I'd already walked most of the way the day prior, I caught the bus towards Union Square instead.
The bus, of course, went through Chinatown (which I hit up the evening prior but was a lot more vibrant in the morning), which bustles with markets on Sunday morning and has nary an English word in sight. I even noticed at one point that I was the only non-Chinese person sitting on the bus, which absolutely delighted me because it was like unexpectedly stumbling into another country.
Union Square, which had a free art exhibit going on that I thoroughly checked out. I'm pretty sure you're supposed to wander around Union Square to check out the shopping, but that activity was never my forte so after awhile I just wandered into a Thai restaurant for lunch and, later, a bookstore. After that, I wandered out to the CalTrain station to get back to Mountain View.

So all in all, I was rather happy with how this weekend turned out- it's difficult to not like San Francisco, of course, and dipping a toe in the international hosteling world again was fun. Plus it's always nice to find yourself in an unexpected mini-vacation over the weekend, even if you have to go to work the next day.

Rediscovering California

Confession time: I have very mixed feelings when it comes to the topic of living in California. A lot of it has to do with being in Silicon Valley- most of it was built within the past 20 years, meaning it's incredibly generic so you could be anywhere, and you need to drive most everywhere, and I'm really not a fan of either point. I really don't think you will catch me going out of my way to live in Silicon Valley in the future.

On the other hand, the rest of California I get along with because it's some of the most gorgeous scenery to be found anywhere and some very unique towns and cities (read: not Silicon Valley). As a result, I've been spending the past few days restoring my faith in California, which involved heading to some great towns to the south of here. The first of these was Santa Cruz on Thursday afternoon- my roommate attends UC-Santa Cruz and had a few errands to attend to, so a few of us tagged along. I still have no idea where the roller coaster is located (the first thing everyone's asked), but I've learned a few important things. Like how, for example, when visiting UCSC, you need to watch where you're going-
That's right, tree protesters. UCSC is built on a hill overlooking the surrounding countryside (resulting in a view that makes one ponder why one went to school in Ohio exactly) and it's built on an old ranch purchased with agreements that you cannot build on over 30% of the land or have buildings taller than the trees. As a result the entire campus is gorgeous and it's like going to school in a giant forest- yielding many more "why Ohio?" ponderings from me- but they want to cut a few down around the science parking lot to build a new building and some people don't like this. As a result, they snuck into the trees a few months back and have stayed up there ever since.
The best shot of the tree protesters I got- if you look carefully, you can see their blue tarps covering their platform and their sign hung between the trees. I was advised to not get closer for a better picture, however, because there's a likely chance of them throwing stuff at you...

By the way, I also learned that these are professional tree protesters. Apparently mere amateurs are not good enough to protest in trees... Though I wonder now what kind of person ends up as a professional tree protester. Someone who really had a thing for tree houses as a kid perhaps?
A shot taken of me in a store in downtown Santa Cruz modeling a really colorful hat. I always wondered where hippies get their gear, and the answer is if you go to places like Santa Cruz there are whole stores devoted to the hippie "look" under the guise of being a store carrying stuff from all over the world or some such. This particular store was of that variety to an actually entertaining degree- they even had Maori jade necklaces right down to the same symbol I have, but my stone is obviously much prettier. I'm sure everyone in New Zealand will be happy to hear that they're hippies according to the stores in Santa Cruz.

Another note: the Santa Cruz bookstore is now close to the top of my list of favoritest bookstores ever, which is really saying something. One could probably devote a whole day there easily, and my roommate was telling me how whenever her dad comes to visit her going to the bookstore is always the first thing he wants to do. Not surprised, really...

But anyway, with that I will shift an hour's drive south on the coast to the town of Monterey, which I hit up this past weekend. Nice little spot though it was crawling with brumbling motorcycles (apparently there was a big race there this weekend) and the weather was a bit chilly and foggy as it is prone on the California coast. As is an indication to how perpetually sunny it always in my part of California, however, I actually loved the fact that it was cloudy all the time since it was different.

When going to Monterey there are a few things it is obligatory to check out, such as the world-famous aquarium and Cannery Row, but my favorite attraction hands-down were the sea lions. They (and the otters, though to a lesser degree) are quite ubiquitous in the water and on the shores around and they're really cool to watch-
A beach covered in sea lions. We only noticed them the second time walking this way, actually, since they almost looked like a bunch of rocks, but of course it's just a bunch of lazy sea lions. So cool, so cute...
My favorite sea lion, who can be seen in the water in the lower left of the previous shot. As it turns out, while sea lions are very agile in the water they really aren't on the land, meaning they move a little with their front flippers but mainly by wriggling their front bodies and slowly bouncing forward. This probably isn't the most fun thing to do and this guy was apparently too lazy to attempt it, as the tide was coming in but he was staying put. As a result, with every wave all he'd do is raise his tail up high so he wouldn't get completely wet, and continue on with his lounging. Silly lazy sea lions.

So in short, I rather like California but on a selective basis (which would make sense, as we're talking about a rather big region here). Will have to pick something new to explore for the rest of them I think... oooh, or I could go to the Santa Cruz Bookstore again...

Bernie Falls

One last set of pictures from the night before I turn in, this set from Bernie Falls. It was well over 90F last Friday, a hot enough temperature that gets most people thinking about swimming prospects, so as there was little else to do on late Friday afternoon a small handful of us headed over to the local state park for some swimming. We'd heard there was a waterfall, of course, but nothing prepared us for this beauty-
All in all, a 150ft waterfall cascading down a cliff with rivulets of water all around it. The secondary waterfalls came straight out of the ground, as they were essentially snowmelt (meaning the water temperature was about 45F). Here's the view from the bottom-

Getting to the bottom was also refreshing because it was about 20 degrees colder than it was at the top of the waterfall. Hooray for natural air conditioning!

Because our group was so enamored by this waterfall (which is one of the prettiest I've seen, and that means something from a girl who toured New Zealand), we ended up spending a lot of time here, primarily occupied by staring at the falls and trying to see how wet we dare get in the freezing water from the tiny side waterfalls. Here's a good example of them-
Basically, if you stood on the edge you could still get into the freezing stream and get your hair wet or whatever, but the water was just too cold for swimming. So we ended up going to the state park's lake for a more respectable venue, which was also cold but actually swimmable.

Friday was alas our last day up at Hat Creek, meaning we headed back here to Mountain View on Saturday. The most eventful thing on Saturday by far happened just a few hours back to here in a story I want to share now lest I forget it...

The setup: there were 19 people on this REU trip, so in order to get around we rented two 12 passenger vans for the week, one driven by Jill Tarter and the other driven by an older student. Jill was going a bit over the speed limit on the way back, which isn't a big deal in California until a cop notices you, which this one did... and he was not happy. When he came up to our van to talk things over, no one doubted for a second that she was going to get a ticket.

Then the cop went back to talk to the passengers in the second van and we waited. And waited. Upon looking back, we noticed that everyone in the second van was laughing, including the cop, and after a five minute discussion he came back all smiles and let us off with a warning. We were on a cell phone within moments of him leaving with the second van in an attempt to find out what had happened.

Apparently what happened was this- the cop had asked who our group was and where we were from, and the student driver told him we were from the SETI Institute. Upon hearing this the cop got really excited, even mentioning something about an acquaintance of his in Texas who had seen a UFO- something that made Jill visibly cringe in the telling. She needn't have, however, because the student driver had been quick to retort "oh, well we look for real aliens!" which was enough to send everyone bursting into laughter for what seemed an eternity.

So all in all, the cop let us go because we were SETI. I didn't realize this summer job had an element of celebrity when I started, but it's definitely given us a story to joke about for the rest of the summer!

Stop 1: Chicago

Greetings from, hmmm where are we... Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin. There's really nothing much here beyond the place we're spending the night, so how about I talk about our two days in Chicago instead-

We got into Chicago Friday evening, just enough time to grab some food and wander around, and then Saturday morn our first stop was the Chicago Institute of Art (aka the world-famous art museum). When I was in Chicago a few weeks ago the line for the art museum stretched around the block so I didn't get to go inside, but this weekend that wasn't a problem so we got to admire the artwork-
This is, I swear, the only Ferris Bueller picture that will be displayed here, though not for lack of any other homages we did to the movie. Anyway...
So one of the things I was looking forward to most in Chicago was meeting up for a few hours with my friend Lauren. Lauren is my alter ego in many ways- we're both physics majors and history minors, for example- and we've known each other for several years. The trick here, though, is we still talk to each other several times a week online despite the fact that we have always lived several hundred miles apart and have only met a small handful of times in the flesh (the first of these was during astronomy camp), but we still manage to meet up for a few hours every few years just to sort of prove something or another. Lauren (and her boyfriend Lane) happens to be working at Argonne National Labs this summer so we hung out for the afternoon for the first time in three years, and it was good.

This picture shows, from right to left, me, my brother Patrick, Lauren, and Lane, standing in front of "The Bean" at Millenium Park. The Bean is a large reflective metal surface that is surprisingly impressive really, particularly if you stand under it-
The view from under The Bean. If you zoom in, can you find the image of the person holding the camera straight up? (Honestly, I haven't tried to find myself yet, so if you do let me know.)
The apartment building near Millennium Park which, if you ask geeky enough people, looks like a computer chip.
The concert venue at the Park, which I was very impressed with as the entire top is covered with a speaker system. It goes without saying that the thing was designed by Frank Gehry, of course.

Anyway, after Lar and I caught up for a few hours and bid goodbye for another few years (really, we have a wonderful but odd friendship), my family headed to the top of the Hancock Tower for dinner. I'd been to the top of the Hancock Tower before, when my friends and I snuck up there for a free view, but going on a trip with your parents has the advantage of a nice dinners-
Plus unlike before I could enjoy the view at leisure, which I was all too happy to do of course...
See, I have decided that when it's all said and done and we look at what the United States has given the rest of the world, skyscrapers will make that list (after the idea of democracy, but before how it often works in practice). And if you want to study skyscrapers, Chicago has got to be the best place I've ever been to do it because there are so many in such variety and- here's something you don't see in a place like New York City- they all stand well by themselves and you can look at each individually. It really is wonderful.
Another shot from the Hancock Tower, except I rather like this one because of that teeny tiny tower you can barely make out on the bottom. That is the Chicago Water Tower from ~350m up, which was the tallest building in the city after the Great Chicago Fire that burned down most of the city in 1871. So odd to put things in that perspective...
The Water Tower from below, as it really is a lovely building.

Anyway, after dinner we did such important things like watch the Pittsburgh Penguins lose Game 4 in the Stanley Cup (not looking good for us, unfortunately...) and the morning after was spent at the Field Museum, which will be skipped in the interest of time and the fact that I've already covered it extensively once. Plus honestly, the highlight of today was what happened in the afternoon at the ballgame...

Manifest Destiny

What happens when you wander in to the local AAA office and say "I'm doing a trip to Chicago, Rapid City, Yellowstone, and San Francisco, got anything to help me out?" Answer- you leave with a bagful of this stuff. I like the one on the top the best: it's a little booklet detailing every single direction we need to take, complete with individual maps and information about which stretches are most scenic.

I'm totally excited about starting tomorrow and should probably work on packing, but have one final thought I'd like to share. Last night, while reading through a few old favorite books from when I was a kid, I realized when they didn't involve tesseracts or Tripods or they were inevitably historical fiction. (You know those American Girl dolls? I had one, but freely admit I chose the one I did because I wanted the books, to the great consternation of my sister who accused me of "abandoning" the doll.) And in all those books people are inevitably homesteading or braving the Oregon Trail or having run-ins with the local Indian tribe- also known as things much more exciting than my childhood in suburban Pittsburgh- and if Little House on the Prairie taught me anything it's that going West is one of those things all Americans should do at some point. And while I might be over a century late, the sentiment is still there.

Call my feelings a sense of adventure combined with a grandly misplaced case of Manifest Destiny. This is gonna be great.

Road Trip USA

A week from today my family and I are going to do something very few people who live in the United States ever do- namely, drive across it. It's sort of unthinkable to be in California without a car and an awful lot of interesting spots in the 2,000+ miles between here and there, so a combination of these two means we should devote a few days doing the drive justice.

So for the next few weeks, here's what my schedule looks like:

Tuesday, May 27- get wisdom teeth extracted (turns out mine are coming in sideways or something... whimper)
Thursday/Friday- drive to Chicago (7.5 hours)
Saturday- Chicago
Sunday, June 1- leave Chicago, begin ~13 hour drive to Rapid City, South Dakota
Monday- arrive in Rapid City, go see Badlands/ Mount Rushmore
Tuesday- go see whichever wasn't seen the day prior, drive to Yellowstone National Park
Wednesday- Yellowstone NP
Thursday- Yellowstone NP
Friday- drive to Salt Lake City, Utah
Saturday- drive across Nevada and such
Sunday, June 8- arrive at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, where I'll be living this summer, sometime in the afternoon
Monday- begin work at the SETI Institute
Wednesday- family flies back to Pittsburgh

Of course, this is all subject to change except for the "start work" dates, but it gives you the rough idea of where we'll be and, hopefully, what sort of cool pictures will be arriving at this blog soon now that it's a travelogue again. If anyone has any suggestions or tips regarding these places or something we're fools to miss let me know.

Packing Up

Whenever someone visits my room for the first time (or even a second, or third...) they immediately become distracted by my wall decorations. This is because every decent-sized surface is covered by an odd collection of maps and postcards-
The reason the US and World maps are interesting is because I use them to mark my Ham radio contacts. It's a hobby of mine that it turns out I'm very good at (if you're ever bored, check what comes up under "Ham radio operator" on Wikipedia), meaning throughout college I have affixed several hundred little star stickers for the various stations I've contacted throughout the world. The US one is particularly impressive, I think, because it's gotten to the point where the various geographical centers of the country are strikingly notable.
The world map, not as filled because further away radio contact is a touch more difficult. The station I use on campus is pretty good though if the markers in southern Africa aren't a tipoff... I didn't take a picture of the rest of the map though, because I haven't made contacts in the regions not shown. I think this has less to do with the capabilities of the station than the fact that I have never have a desire to wake up during the prime operating hours for Asia/Oceania (their evening, which is early morning for us).
I told you the postcards are cool- this wall is covered with about 200 of them from all seven continents. I get then from a few sources, mainly Postcrossing, radio, picking them up myself, or bugging friends...
A close-up of the postcard wall. This one was in our common room this year and my suitemates and I had a bit of a party sticking them up... I finally took them down last night, and it really was sad. There's nothing like taking down several hundred postcards to make you realize you're moving on from your home to a totally new one.

So now I've moved away from Cleveland for the summer, the bad news of which is I had to say goodbye to all my graduating friends but the good news of which is this blog will start up as a travelogue again. I'm in Pittsburgh now, but within hours will be on the road to my brother's college graduation in North Carolina for a few days. And in just a few short weeks I will be driving across the United States to my summer job in California- an adventure I am truly looking forward to, and will undoubtedly be a great source of postcards for next year's display. Stay tuned!

Chicago, Chicago...

Whenever I mention it, a lot of people have had a hard time believing I'd never been to Chicago. It's right there, just a few hours drive away from Cleveland, and apparently if you've been to four continents it's assumed you've already hit up the major cities near you. Dunno why, but that's the way it is, and fact of the matter is I never got around to visiting Chicago until last weekend.

I will say though, now that I've been I'm very happy I have. It really is a lovely city, filled with wide streets and impressive skyscrapers combined with one of the nicest waterfronts you're likely to find anywhere. If you get the chance to spend some time there, you really should.

But anyway, we spent our day starting off at the waterfront of Lake Michigan, admiring the clear skies and skyline. Our first stop was at the Art Institute of Chicago, but there was a line literally wrapping around the block for tickets so we just admired the outside briefly-
And then, realizing there's only so much to do on the outside of a museum, we wandered over to the world-famous Field Museum of Natural History a bit further down the lakefront. As we were all geeks anyway, this was not a problem, but I don't think even non-geeks would have an issue with the Field Museum as it's a magnificent place.
The entrance hall to the Field Museum, originally built for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair (yes, the same one in Devil in theWhite City). It's impressively large even today.

This dinosaur is Sue the Tyrannasorous Rex, who lives in the main entrance hall. Sue is the most complete T-Rex skeleton in the world (~90% has been found), and she really is a lovely old gal... We spent most of our time wandering around the plant section, resulting in many "oh, so that's what tea looks like when you grow it!" moments (ok I won't lie, we were most interested in the section on hallucinogenic plants), but what impressed me most was the exhibit covering 4.5 billion years of life on Earth. They redid it just a few years ago, combining the world-class fossils the museum has with some new graphics, and it has to be the most impressive such display I've seen anywhere.
Basically, the display starts you off with the origins of life- nothing too exciting, just single-celled organisms, except this is the Field Museum so if you pay attention you'll notice they have the oldest rock with amino acids on display and the first fossils showing multicellular growth. Sweet! Then life evolves, and you get treated to a view of what the pre-Cambrian ocean would have been like (shown above) along with the fossils laid out below so you can match pictures with fossils and really get a sense of things. Whenever you're done you just walk on, and as the display is linear you eventually reach other eras, ranging from dinos to the first mammals to the first humans... you get the idea. You pass through the extinction zones too, which are rather interesting in their own way because it gives you perspective on how things fall into place.
An example of one of many wonderful fossils they have at the Field Museum. This thing is perhaps six feet tall and tell me, have you ever seen a perfectly preserved palm frond with fish randomly added in anywhere else in the world?
A giant sloth that's part of the exhibit. I never really thought I could find something scary that's stupid enough to grab its own arms thinking they're tree branches and fall to death (no really, they do that!), but this guy would scare the hell out of me...
The last Field Museum picture, coincidentally also the last from the evolution display, which is a montage of images around Charles Darwin's famous quote, "from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." That sums it up wonderfully...

Anyway, we left the Field Museum and headed towards Michigan Avenue, slowly making our way north toward the John Hancock Center...
If you ever want to study skyscraper architecture, by the way, Chicago's got to be the best place in the world to do it. Skyscrapers really are, for the most part, an American thing and if you go to a place like New York City they're not as well spread out to be admired (as Manhattan's only got a set amount of space to work with), but in Chicago everything is a clear and glittering work of steel and glass. They're still building gigantic ones too, like the new Trump Tower, which is impressive in itself as most cities in the USA haven't done such a thing in several years.
If you ever plan to go to the West, take the highway, that's my way, that's the best...

For some odd reason, I have a mild fascination with Route 66- I think it has to do with the romantic idea of the road, coupled by the fact that everyone I know from outside the US thinks it's a big deal whereas everyone from the US knows it's been decommissioned years ago as an actual highway (and that no one within the US really bothers now that the Interstate exists, including Okies). So there was a disproportionate amount of happiness on my part to discover that Historic Route 66 begins just across from the Art Institute on a side street if you're walking up Michigan Avenue, to the point that it merits mention here.
Another stop was in Millennium Park, which is a bunch of outdoor art done at the turn of the millenium. This picture is of "the bean," a giant shiny stainless steel sculpture which reflects the Chicago skyline and the numerous tourists around it. Unfortunately this is the best picture I got, as my camera started getting rather finicky and stopped taking pictures for a few hours, but you get the idea.
Anyway, we wandered north on Michigan Avenue, stopping to sample some famous Chicago-style deep-dish pizza (verdict: it's awesome if you're ravenously hungry, which we were), heading towards the John Hancock Center. The Hancock Center is the second largest building in Chicago after the famous Sears Tower of course, and we heard that firstly the view is better from up there and secondly it's a lot cheaper. As it turns out, the Hancock Center has a lounge area on the 96th floor, so you can go up for free (as opposed to paying $11 for the observation deck) and have a drink instead, which we figured would work out cheaper and better so that's what we did. It ended up that we spent so much time admiring the view from various parts of the floor (there are several different sides, the one in the picture above is facing north) that we decided to leave without said drink and we got to admire the skyline for free!
The John Hancock Center from below. I consider it to be a modern marvel in itself that I took this picture and the one preceding it no less than five minutes apart!

And after that, as it was getting late and we were still driving back to Cleveland that night, we headed out on the El to our car and began the long ride home (and it should be noted that I've now been to more than half the states even by the most frugal estimates, as we passed through Indiana as well). Chicago really is a fun place to poke around, and I'm glad I got the chance! Perhaps I'll pass through it again in a few months if I end up driving out to San Francisco.

Fermilab!

There's a famous story amongst physicists about Robert Wilson, the first director of Fermilab who played a huge role in the development and construction of the facility. Once, when pressed by a US Senator on whether Fermilab would do for national security, Wilson retorted by saying "it has nothing to do with the defense of our nation, except to make it worth defending."

I was thinking a lot about this this weekend because our Physics and Astronomy Club got the wonderful opportunity to visit Fermilab, and let the record show that Wilson is absolutely right. It really is a great place, filled with world-class research that is downright exciting to see for yourself!
This is the main building at Fermilab, which was our first stop of the day after waking up really early in the morning to drive the ~6 hours from Cleveland to Batavia, Illinois. We were supposed to meet at 6 but I didn't wake up until my friend called me at 6:25 asking where I was, which prompted a loud "why the [censored] did my alarm not go off?!?" followed by frantic scurrying out the door. Our car was actually on the road by 6:35 though, so no problem getting there (and I confess I don't remember much of the drive, as I spent most of it napping in the back seat there and back).

But anyway, if you ever go and tour Fermilab you'll probably be taken to the top story of the building above, which is a museum of sorts for the facility and has a great view-

This picture is looking out from the main enterance. Don't be fooled by the decorative-looking ponds, they're actually there to drain in case the giant Tevatron accelerator's superconducting magnets stop doing their job correctly.... Fermilab for the most part doesn't look that impressive from above for the simple reason that most particle experiments are done underground, but they've creatively made up for this by making the place the biggest restorative prairie in the state of Illinois. There's even a herd of buffalo wandering around the place.
This is another view from the 15th story, this one looking towards part of the Tevatron (the entire ring is four miles in circumference or so, so I couldn't even begin to see all of it, let alone get a decent picture). Essentially the point of the Tevatron is to speed up ionized hydrogen gas so it travels just a tiny fraction under the speed of light, then smash together the particles and see what we see. It's sort of like if you had a clock and smashed it to have all the parts fly apart and tried to reassemble the clock based on what you find. Doesn't sound very effective in a sense, but this is really what particle physicists do except for atoms and for Fermilab this proved to be quite effective- the top quark and bottom quark were discovered here.
We couldn't go into the Tevatron itself but there was a mockup with mirrors so you could step in and sort of get a feel for what it's like. Currently the Tevatron is the most powerful operational particle accelerator in the world until the Large Hadron Collider turns on later this year, after which the Tevatron will be shut down (as the LHC will be several times more powerful). We also learned that the Tevatron gets an electric bill of approximately a million dollars a month, making me conclude that the local electric company really hit the jackpot when Batavia won the rights to build it.
We did get to take a look at the control room for the Tevatron, which is pictured above. I must say the operators had a great sense of humor about it- there's a large glass panel all the tours stop at, so they put up a "do not feed the operators" sign on the door for good measure. Further, at one point one of the operators abruptly turned us and snapped a picture of us with his own camera as retaliation for all the ones we were taking, and I thought that was hilarious.

We also checked out one of the smaller experiments on site, known as MiniBooNE. This one tests for neutrino mass via neutrino oscillations, and they specially built a tunnel 300 feet below ground to do it (so ~30 stories). It's a pretty long elevator ride!
Here's what the tunnel looked like underground. I think I prefer looking at the sky.
This large box is part of an experiment in the tunnel trying to find dark matter. Basically there's a bit of water inside and a particle passing through leaves a bubble trail, so you're looking for a bubble trail that would be left over from a dark matter candidate... Of course, you get noise from things like cosmic rays that find their way in even down here and radioactive decay from the glass holding the water and all sorts of things most people would never think of, so no dark matter yet. You can hear the machine go "ping" once a minute or so thanks to all the false positives.

And this is in no way a critical judgment against my friends who are dedicating their lives to the dark matter search, but I decided within five minutes this is not exactly my sort of project. This is, of course, the amount of time the novelty of being 30 stories underground wears off on you, and don't know if I could spend years obsessing over if my glass is radioactive and what not. Different strokes for different folks...
This is the origin of the neutrinos in miniBooNE, which are generated here on the order of a billion neutrinos pulsed every 2.5 seconds (so standing in front of it means you're in the most concentrated beam of neutrinos on the planet- luckily they pass right through you harmlessly!). The neutrinos then tunnel underground to another detector in a mine in Soudan, Minnesota several hundred miles away- leading physicists to joke that they're using Wisconsin as a drift space- and they vary the type of neutrinos produced so they can see if there are any differences between the pulses upon detection.

Explaining how exactly you make a neutrino beam takes a fair amount of time and I don't want to make this much longer than it already is/ will be, so if you're interested take a gander over here.
Finally, our group underground (there were actually 20 or so students on this trip, but only so many of us could be underground at a given time). Now that I look at this picture, all I can say is I'm the one who really stands out compared to all the dark colors everyone else was apparently wearing!

As one last entertaining postscript, we went to the visitor center while waiting for the last group to finish touring, which is filled with cute little science displays you usually find at science centers to entertain little kids. Needless to say we had a blast, but I was particularly enamored with this one-
I really can't pretend to know why it was there, but in short it's a scintillator panel cosmic ray detector, which is something I'm using in my own senior project setup! So if I don't get mine to work, think they'll let me hang out in the Fermilab visitor center and collect data?

But anyway, that was the end of our time at Fermilab as we were off to a swanky restaurant to hang out with some members of the Case Alumni Association who were kind enough to foot our trip bill. I spent a lot of time talking to Cyrus Taylor, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and speaker for the night, and we spent a great deal of time discussing things like women in science, string theory, and Dean Taylor's crazy backpacking trip through Tanzania after he got his PhD which involved an economic meltdown and him getting sick with malaria for three weeks. You know, normal physicist talk!

And last but not least we were all exhausted having gotten up so early, so we went back to the hotel to crash. Because after all there was a big day ahead of us, with the city of Chicago looming nearby...