Sitting waiting blogging

Right now I'm in my lab at work, waiting for glue to dry.

Literally.

As I've mentioned briefly before, this summer I'm doing orthopedics research at Notre Dame - an interesting intersection of mechanical, materials, and biological engineering. (Which are, incidentally, the three fields I am most interested in studying.) When people ask me what I do, my favorite response is, “Oh, I play with cow bones.”

That’s using the term “play” rather liberally, of course. So when I say “I play with cow bones,” what I really mean is that I cut bovine cortical shafts into little uniform pieces, glue them onto slides, drill precise 3-mm holes in them, polish them ‘til they shine, add fluorescent dye to them, bathe them with UV light, and take pictures of them via digital microscope. Eventually I’ll figure out the diffusion coefficient of the particular dye I’m using, but I don’t have enough samples yet to get a good result, and the anisotropic nature of bone mucks everything up anyway.

I’ve also learned that phosphoric acid, lactic acid, and calcium hydroxide can be combined to synthesize artificial hydroxyapatite whiskers, a close approximation of the carbonated apatite comprising the mineral phase of bone, but only when mixed together in the right stoichiometric quantities under sufficiently high temperature and pressure.

Who knew?

Certainly not me, or at least not until a few weeks ago, when for some reason one of the grad students here decided that I, despite being the youngest person in the lab by about three years, was capable enough to start the synthesis reaction myself. That was a risky idea, let me tell you. Fortunately no limbs, eyeballs, or beavers were harmed in the whisker-making process.

And yet, in spite of all the advanced bioengineering research going on here – research that I am actually a (relatively) useful part of! – right now I am still waiting for the glue on my new slides to dry.

So what are you all doing this summer?

Fun with phobias

Today is Friday the 13th. Duhn duhn duhn dunh!

Then again, considering that the world did not end on June 6, 2006 - nor on July 7, 2007 - I don't think any of us really should be worrying about a measly little superstition like Friday the 13th.

However, this provides a great opportunity to highlight what is, in my humble opinion, one of the funniest and most ridiculous words in the English language. That word is, of course, paraskavedekatriaphobia - an irrational and morbid fear of Friday the 13th. Incidentally, paraskavedekatriaphobia is actually a specialized form of triskaidekaphobia, the fear of the number 13 in general.

Don't you feel educated?

I'm Not Sleeping (Yet)

Harry was amazing.

Naturally.

I would say more, but it's freaking three o'clock in the morning and I need some sleep before 7:45 rolls around. Yes, it's a tough life I live, but someone's gotta do it.

I see her on the TV, I see her in the movies
I see her in these animals that dance beside my bed

(Whoever knows who wrote the song I'm quoting gets a cookie.)

HARRY HARRY HARRY HARRY

So, in case you've been living under a rock for the past six months and haven't heard, tonight is the U.S. premier of the fifth Harry Potter movie.

And my friends and I - after camping outside the movie theater for weeks on end, fighting off hordes of crazed fans, and shelling out considerable cold cash - have tickets for the midnight showing.

In case it wasn't obvious, by the way, that's a blatantly fictitious story - except, sadly, for the part about the money. But it sounds much more exciting my way.

Anyway, to get to the point of this entry, the only minor drawback to this amazing opportunity is that - oh, right - I still have work tomorrow because someone decided to premiere this movie in the middle of the week.

Incidentally, I'm at work right now. But one of the great advantages of academia in general, and research specifically, is the tremendous amount of downtime. Which I am now putting to good use. I get another blog entry under my belt, you hopefully get some laughs or at least a smile - everybody's happy! Except maybe my professor, but fortunately he doesn't read this anyway.

But as I was saying, because I have work tomorrow, I have to be somewhat conscious about 7:30 in the morning. And since I know that coffee, Mountain Drew, and Red Bull are not, contrary to popular opinion, healthy alternatives to sleep, my schedule for the rest of the day looks something like this:

3:45 - stop slacking off and get back to work
5:00 - leave work
5:15 - get home
5:16 - fall asleep
10:30 - get up, get dressed, get out of the house, get in line
11:15 - theater starts seating
midnight - HARRY HARRY HARRY HARRY
2:45ish - movie finishes, I drive home
3:00 - crash in my bed
7:30 - wake up and begin the day

Needless to say, I have both high hopes and high expectations for this movie. Here's wishing Order of the Phoenix will be worth sacrificing some sleep.

The Top Ten Reasons I Love MIT #10

The Assassins' Guild

"You see a flock of 20 screaming chickens. Roleplay accordingly."

In high school, I was involved in a lot of extracurriculars. Community service, political clubs, Quiz Bowl, Science Olympiad...I could list all of them, but since this (fortunately) isn't a college application, I'll spare you. Suffice it to say I was a very busy beaver in high school. And I've always figured that's not likely to change when I head off to college.

After all, colleges have lots of extracurriculars too. Nothing strange about that, right?

Wrong.

At least when it comes to MIT.

As most of you probably know, MIT is not a normal school. Now you could be nihilistic about it and argue that there really is no such thing as "normality" anyway, but I think MIT would serve as a superb counter-example to that hypothesis. Just being on campus is enough for almost anyone to realize that MIT - from the architecture to the classes, from the teachers to the students - is like no place you've ever been before. Whatever your expectations about college, MIT and its students will defy them in the most extravagant way possible.

That is, in a nutshell, the reason I fell in love with MIT in the first place, because real life is not predictable. Real life does not conform to your expectations. Real life is wild, crazy, inexplicable. Real life is not a straight line from here to there, from birth to death - it is a twisting path, riddled with sudden turns and departures, the different trails combining and separating only to merge again, a beautiful pattern that only really makes sense many years down the road.

MIT is real. Sometimes the lows are lower, but only because the highs are higher. And even if everyone embraces the same traditions, there are still hundreds, even thousands, of variations on those cherished themes.

Other schools have traditions, sure. Other schools have strange campuses or funny quirks. And maybe I'm biased because I'm actually going to MIT, as opposed to one of those "other" schools. But just the same, no college I've ever visited has felt as real, as unpredictable, as wondrously strange as MIT.

There are a lot of examples of how MIT is different. As I go through this little Top Ten list of mine, I'll probably mention most of them, or the most common ones anyway. For me, though, one of the most concrete examples of what makes MIT different is embodied in one of the clubs on campus.

That club is the Assasssins' Guild.

First things first, that is indubitably the most badass name for a club ever.

More importantly - and to be perfectly honest I only realized this now, literally as I'm writing this entry - the basic concept of the Guild almost perfectly mirrors MIT's actual mission. Just like MIT itself is dedicated to finding new solutions to big problems, the Assassins' Guild is all about having fun in completely new and unexpected ways. Which basically means conducting outrageous LARPs - live-action roleplaying games, kind of like a novel or a play, except that you're writing the script, along with a couple dozen other fellow Assassins, who have their own ideas about how the story should end.

Then there's Patrol - the staple of the Guild, which is run (played) every Saturday night. Think paintball, except with dart guns. But that description doesn't even come close to capturing the sheer chaotic enjoyment of the game. Ah, there's nothing really like adrenaline, is there? I ended up playing Patrol during CPW*, and let me just say I am looking forward to next time.

I could probably say more, but this entry is long enough already. There's only one thing I really want to say, though, which I probably haven't been too clear about. The point of this entry isn't really that the Assassins' Guild, itself, is the #10 reason I love MIT - rather, the extracurriculars in general are the #10 reason. After all, all of MIT's extracurriculars are fantastic and I could easily write an entry about any of them.

It's just that the Assassins' Guild was one of the first clubs I discovered, even before I got in to MIT, thanks to a cleverly-placed flyer I found in the Infinite last summer. Even more importantly, though I have always believed that the Guild is truly representative of what makes MIT so different from any other school - and that is the primary reason I felt it was only fair to honor the Guild with its own entry.

And, as I said, I love the name.

*MIT-speak for Campus Preview Weekend, when hordes of pre-frosh descend on MIT to partake in a veritable orgy of crazy activities, numerous visits to classes and dorms, random visits to random parts of campus, liquid nitrogen ice cream, and lots of free food. Because no college activity is complete without free food.

And because the corollary to that theorem is that no blog entry is complete without links, here's the Assassins' own homepage. And while I'm on the topic of extracurriculars, I'm also rather fond of - among others - OrigaMIT, the Debate Team, and Rune.

Am I shamelessly plugging for these clubs? Maybe.

Is that because I'm excited to join them? Hell yes!

Glimpses of what's to come

Random piece of news: today I signed up for the Reuse and Assassins' Guild mailing lists. I feel more and more like a real MIT student.

Also, while I was walking to lunch the other day, I came up with the most awesome idea for an entry. Or, rather, a series of entries.

First installment should be coming up soon. A tantalizing teaser: it deals with the Assassins' Guild.

In other news, if you'll permit me to brag a little, I called for my AP scores a few days ago. To quote something I posted to the MIT Facebook group:

AP practice materials: $20
AP test charge: $83
Getting your scores by phone: $8
Passing out of 18.01: priceless

Translation: I pulled out a 5 on BC Calc, which I am so happy about you cannot believe. I had always been very confident about how well I did on multiple-choice questions, so I guess that helped me. The free response questions, on the other hand? Not so confident. One of the questions, for example, featured what basically amounted to the Polar Equations From Hell. And since I had self-taught myself everything I knew about polars in the first place, I bombed that question in spectacular fashion. Thank God for generous curves. (That was not supposed to be innuendo. But I'm too lazy to change it, and anyway it kind of makes me laugh.)

I also got a 5 on English Literature. Which really makes me laugh, because it means all the time I spent on the FEE is now completely redundant. (I won't say it was wasted, exactly. Just redundant.) But I knew that when I took the FEE anyway.

Also, I think I've come up with a new name for the blog, which will be revealed shortly. I'm probably making it sound more dramatic than it really is, but whatever. For some reason the idea of a new name makes me very excited. Change can be good, I guess.

Meanwhile, I know there's a lot of bad stuff in the world that's probably more worthy of your and my attention, but this just strikes me as very sad.

Leaving South Bend, never easy

As I write this, one of my best friends is on a plane, heading to West Point for basic training.

It is, I know, something he has always wanted.

But that doesn't make it any easier for me, for his friends, for his family - for all of us he's leaving behind. It reminds me a little of that line in "Leaving New York," It's easier to leave than to be left behind.

That song's always had a lot of meaning for me, and I'm not even from New York. Now, though, it really hits home.

John is one of those guys who's everybody's friend. Smart, funny, good-looking, kind of happy-go-lucky, football player, honors student...just an all-around great guy. Yes, he had girl problems like all of us; yes, he could be insensitive; yes, sometimes he cut corners or he slacked off. He wasn't perfect, but he was...he was John.

And now he's just a new cadet. He gave us his address, so we can send letters to him while he's at Basic, and we can't even put his first name on them. They're taking his name, and I don't know what else, and I'm scared that the John I see in a few months, if I even do get to see him that soon, isn't going to be the John I knew.

I think we all feel this way, all of my friends. It's becoming increasingly clear that we only have precious little time left together. A few months ago, college was just a letter in the mail, a dream that we desperately wanted to come true. Now it's real, and we realize that the dream is bittersweet.

John's been a great friend to me these past few years, and I'd miss him terribly even if he weren't leaving so soon, even if he weren't going to West Point. But at the same time, John and his departure are also just one example of what we're all going to be going through very soon, as we get ready to leave South Bend for the new school and new city we've chosen for ourselves.

I'm excited, naturally. I know I made the right choice, I know that MIT is the right school for me. The academics and the facilities are everything I've ever dreamed of, the students and the faculty fit my own personality without me having to conform to their standards - and I am going to love living in Boston.

But in a way my excitement is also just a facade covering up all the fear and anxiety I have about actually leaving home, actually drinking from the firehose that is MIT. I joke about being buried by p-sets, but what if I really can't handle all the work? My parents keep telling me not to do too much and spread myself too thin (and I, in return, keep insisting that I know how to manage my time), but what if I really do end up taking on more than I can handle?

And I am afraid, just a little bit, of my fellow classmates - which is kind of ironic, because everybody I've met, at CPW or on Facebook or elsewhere, has been completely friendly and I'm really looking forward to meeting all of them in August. But they've all done such amazing things and all seem to know exactly what they'll be doing at MIT, and sometimes I feel very small compared to them. I worry about fitting in, about not being overlooked socially or academically, about whether or not my roommate will get along, about succeeding in my classes, about extra-curriculars, about getting a UROP. I even worry about whether or not I'll actually have enough time to watch the Notre Dame games every Saturday, like I've been planning to.

But...in spite of all that...I'm doing just fine. I've made my choice, and even if I am scared I'm not going to let that stop me from having the time of my life. It's going to be hard, but it's supposed to be. And that's the way I like it.

My future's mercurial, the past...I'm not going to forget it. But I won't let it hold me back.

So maybe I've made you smile, maybe I made you frown. But I'm not changing my mind, and I'm not turning around.

I'm going to MIT.

This one's for you, John.