Yo, I'm in grad school. How's that going? Well, not too bad. In a way, I can't seem to ever get away from MIT. Half the books I use in my graduate classes were written by my MIT professors. During the first week of my product design and development class last semester, we were assigned a reading about all-around drug delivery rock star and MIT professor Bob Langer. The professor asked if anybody in the class knew who Bob Langer was. Half the hands in the room shot up, and a bunch of awestruck students breathlessly explained, "OH, he came to my school once to give a lecture, and I could totally tell that everything in this article is totally true, like when he was talking about polymer synthesis, I could really hear his attitudes toward technology licensing and start-up companies." I was going to say, "Yeah, I know 5 people who work in Langer Lab, and I've worked with the MIT Technology Licensing Office." But I didn't say anything, because I try not to be a total jerk all the time.

I mean, not all the time. Today I was looking at an old blog entry that I had started four months ago, and I discovered that I actually typed this:

So, yo, let me say this unequivocally. Even if you graduate MIT with 72,000 credits in four years and publish 100 papers in Nature, start-up a biofuels company, write a cello concerto that is performed by MITSO, and obtain an Erdos number of 2, all of this in 4 years at MIT, if you ever ask yourself, "Do I have time for a girlfriend?" then YOU ARE DOING SOMETHING WRONG.

Man, what a total jerk. That rather harsh quotation comes from a blog entry entitled "Don't let it control you!", which I've been trying unsuccessfully to write for the past six months. That title, in turn, comes from Professor X's final line in X3, one of my favorite movie moments of all time. I was considering keeping the title when composing this new blog entry, but I decided that Walt Whitman would be an acceptable substitute.

Because let's get this straight. I am an old man now. There are undergrads working in my lab, and I introduce myself to them, and they say, "Oh, you're not an undergrad, right? Because you look so much older." When I was studying reaction kinetics on my plane ride back to the bay area, the flight attendant stopped while delivering my second cup of black coffee to remark, "Are you a grad student? I could never understand any of that math stuff!" (that's okay, I'm bad at writing and being nice to people that I don't know). I don't even get carded when I buy alcohol anymore. I mean, I'm guessing that I wouldn't.

Granted, most of it probably has to do with the sweet beard that I've grown. A bunch of the ChemE's decided to grow beards as part of a male bonding ritual before prelim exams in January. I just liked mine, so I decided to keep it for this month. Except for getting food caught in it, it's been working out pretty well. You knew I couldn't get through my last ever entry on MITblogs without posting a picture of myself, didn't you?

But what makes this old man think of school today? Well, I've been systematically trying to remove myself from most of my MIT mailing lists. I took myself off my old floor's mailing list the other day after discussion veered away from Apple Bake domination and onto discussions of which Star Wars movies they were going to watch on a given night. Which, I mean, is fun, but not really that important to my life anymore. Whereas apple pies baked 4,000 miles from me are totally fascinating in my inbox. Anyway, I actually managed to finally remove myself from the MIT Hillel list, somehow. I'm working on getting off of MTG. But I keep myself on the MITblog e-mail list, just because we're awesome. So today I woke up to the following e-mail on the MITblog list, from one of its younger contributors:

Turns out that the aforementioned early showing of 21 is at noon...since I'm not quite willing to skip class just to see a movie, even one about MIT, I will neither be going nor blogging. If by some black magic one of you guys also has the opportunity to see it, I retract my dibs...but I really would like to blog about it when it comes out for real on March 28 (during Spring Break).

Sorry for the extra emails. ^_^

Apparently MIT is sponsoring a sneak preview of 21, the Bringing Down the House movie adaption, this week. As an old man, thinking of school, I was concerned that one of MIT's rising young stars was "not quite willing to skip class just to see a movie, even one about MIT." So I wrote back and linked to some entries that provided examples of me skipping school to do awesome things. The response? Apparently the blogger has a HASS paper due at 3 PM that day, and is therefore understandably nervous about going to see a movie at noon. The e-mail concluded, probably half-jokingly, "You're a bad influence, Sam Maurer."

I was eating a salad comprised of spinach, walnuts, grapes, peas, and goat cheese in a balsamic vinaigrette, which is clearly what have must inspired the following burst of eloquence from me.

Hokay, so HASS papers are important. But unless you're planning to still be writing the essay at noon on the day it's due (which, I mean, I probably would be), seriously, go to the movie. Plan to go, and then if your paper doesn't work out on time, then skip the movie.

I'm a good influence. I didn't realize until my senior year that it was okay to skip classes for reasons other than total exhaustion. The sooner you figure this out, the happier your MIT experience will be. I mean, within reason. Don't skip all your 2.007 labs to go tanning on the esplanade, but if the choice is between awesome movie preview or ozonolysis, don't pick ozonolysis.

I was actually going to write my last MITblog entry on this topic, but I got bored. You can still see the draft; it's called "Don't let it control you!"

And I read it back over, and I realized that this was exactly what I'd been trying to say for the past six months. I thought "Don't let it control you!" would be a good message to conclude my MITblogging career forever. But, you know, you've got to be original. And plus, that entry was getting too convoluted with passive/aggressive attacks at other blogs I'd been reading, not neglecting your girlfriend, how I was a pudgy awkward kid in high school, and a symbolic 6.003 add/drop form that I hung on the inside of the door of my dorm room. I feel like this one has worked out a lot better. It's a little bit friendlier, and I feel like it just generally is more cohesive and has more organic unity. Which, for me, is saying a lot.

So if I'm gonna gather my youthful memories and blooms, as Walt Whitman suggests, and if I'm going to leave you with one message to summarize the most important thing I learned during my four years at MIT, it's going to be this:

Don't pick ozonolysis. Don't ever pick ozonolysis.

So this will be my last MITblog entry from Europe. Probably forever. I'm just chilling here in my air-conditioned (!) hostel room, listening to the dude above me snore, and I thought that rather than reading all the entries at smashbros.com some for the bajillionth time, I should make good on my promise to write something from Spain in my last entry.

I wanted to title this entry "Now I'm a little boy in Spain playing pianos filled with flames" but it messed up the formatting on the MITblogs website, and also I've been thinking a lot about the song "I who have nothing," by Jordin Sparks, because I'm totally done with all this MISTI reporting business. I have nothing! I mean, I'm not done with the parts that involve getting all the videos off of the video camera, or organizing them, or summarizing all my data, or editing the video into good five-second quotes that can pop up dynamically when you roll over "wienerschnitzel" on the new Flash-enabled MISTI website or whatever. But, I mean, the actual taking pictures and videos of people, I'm done with! Which is both good and bad. For one thing, it means I won't get to go around Europe hearing about people's awesome jobs and taking pictures like this one...

...of MISTI France intern Anjali '09, standing along the original Prime Meridian in the Observatory of Paris...

...or this one, of MISTI Spain interns Sohrab '08 and Inessa '09 enjoying tapas at a Spanish tapas bar. I for one was shocked to discover that tapas actually exist outside of my eighth-grade Spanish textbook. Cacahuetes!

However, being done with my MISTI reporting also means that I can stop living out of a 40-pound suitcase with a broken wheel, and start interacting with people on a real, personal basis again, instead of my conversations going something like, "Oh, that's great that you're working with entamoeba histolytica! Is this your first time in Europe... oh, wait, can I get a picture of you pipetting that? Or, I mean, with this microscope; whatever looks more science-y."

I also have nothing in terms of money anymore. I'm sort of going with the whole "leave Europe with zero euros, that way you won't get screwed by airport exchange rates" plan. So I have 6 euro-cents right now, and that's about it. Well, actually, I have about $20.58 in my pockets right now, but 50 cents of that are in Czech kroner and the other 20 are in US dollars, so, counting currency that Western Europe actually uses, I have 6 cents. And a Sub Klub card that I picked up at a Subway in Berlin. You know, I got Sub des Tages and Sub del Dia on this trip, but not Sub du Jour. Next time, Gadget.

But I think I've been rationing my money pretty carefully. After my last dinner with MISTI Spain interns last night, I gazed into my wallet to find a total of 6.86 in Euro. Then, in reference to the quote, "When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left over, I buy food and clothing," which I saw on somebody's facebook profile, I spent my first three euros this morning at the Museo del Prado. I didn't even know what was at the Prado, I just thought it would be cool. But I kind of guessed that Las Meninas would be there, and it was, and I learned a lot about it eavesdropping on three separate English-language guided tours, and the museum also had a special exhibition on Patinir, who invented landscapes. After walking around the museum for five hours I was hungry, because six pieces of buttered toast at the hostel's free breakfast just couldn't cut it, so I headed to the nearest Döner Kebap stand I could find, figuring that it would be a cheap way to get my last Döner fix for a long, long time. Thankfully, 3.00 euros is just about the universal standard price for Döner in Western Europe, so I was able to get a tasty sandwich with a slight Spanish flavor, but unfortunately drinks were a bank-breaking 1.20. Blast. So I went to a convenience store with no prices labeled. When the owner was done speaking in an unknown Asian language on his cell phone, I asked him how much a can of soda cost. After three attempts, I finally understood that he was saying "ochenta." Perfecto. So I gave him a fifty, two tens, and two fives, and hoped that two years of MATLAB hadn't diminished my capacity for simple math too much. And then I had six cents left.

OH MY STARS AND GARTERS, I just found out that the "I buy books, then food" quote is attributed to Desiderius Erasmus. Could this entry have any more organic unity?

So, six cents. Six cents and a snoring roommate. I mean, I could use my credit card or something, but, well, IT'S FREAKING SPAIN and even if I somehow find somewhere that takes a credit card and isn't touristy and overpriced, I've still got extra charges for using it in a foreign country. Which, I mean, I'm more ideologically opposed to than anything, because with what they're paying me for this trip, I think I can spare 60 cents in extra charges. There's also the possibility of finding a Deutsche Bank ATM, which is free for Bank of America customers, where I could pick up a quick 20 euros.

But the catch is that I get free breakfast tomorrow (eight pieces of toast, two bowls of cornflakes, no questions asked), and then after checking out of my hostel and heading to the Madrid airport, I get my 15 euro key deposit back. So, while 15.06 is a little light for two days in Europe (I've got a one-night layover in Frankfurt), I think that 35.06 might be a little too much. Oh, like a high school senior's relationship status after graduation, it's complicated.

Anyway, I've gotten hungry since I started writing this entry, so it's time to go do... something... about that. I can't wait to get home, and I promise to write tons of informative entries as a lame duck blogger from the US, both here and on my MISTI blog. It's been a long, crazy, exhausting ride here in Europe, but when you wake up and say to yourself, "Hmmm... I have an hour or two before work, I think I'll go take pictures of myself in front of Sacre Coeur."

...well, it's hard to complain too much.

France. I'm in France. But I just got done with Italy. And I just got done with uploading way, way too much blog to the other blog that MIT pays me to write. So you should go over and read that now. At your leisure. I mean, because it still applies here--you, too could write 6,000 words of blog entries on an 8-hour train ride, if you just choose MIT as your undergraduate institution.

Basically my job has evolved into a never-ending search for free wireless access. Today that came in the form of a McDonald's in Marseille, France. Seriously. As Samuel L. Jackson prophesied so long ago, their main hamburger is indeed called a "Royale with Cheese." But one thing I wasn't ready for was that another one of their sandwiches is called a Croque McDo, which I guess must be some unhealthy version of the Croque-monsieur, which is itself just grilled cheese with cream on top, and a fried egg, if you're a lady.

But I didn't get any of that today, I just got a milk shake, which is just called a Milk Shake, not a... I don't know, a Lait Shake? I really don't speak this language. So I bought my 95-cent Lait Shake and sat here for 3 hours using free McWireless. Problem was that apparently MIT's FTP server didn't like being contacted by a wireless host called MCDONALDS. Yeah, I can't really imagine why. So I couldn't upload any of my photos. Which was the whole reason I came to McDonald's in the first place. I mean, I'm glad I found out about the Croque McDo and everything, but I was kind of bummed.

So I was looking through free photo upload sites, which I'd never used before because MIT webspace is just so convenient, and about fifteen minutes later, I said to myself, "You know, I bet Google has an application for this." I mean, duh, Sam.

Okay, seriously, they're playing "No Scrubs" now, in this McDonalds in Marseille where you can order a Croque McDo. I can't even process this anymore.

Anyway, five minutes later I uploaded all the photos I needed to upload to Google Photos using my Croque-McFreeWireless. It might not be the best upload space up there, but, then again, since it's Google, it very well might be. Now I'm off on a bus to Aix-en-Provence, France. I think.

I'll probably be in Spain by the next time I blog, so, until then... Hasta mañana, monsieur.

So I'm here in Germany, meeting up with tons of MIT interns while staying at sketchy youth hostels and subsisting mostly on döner. I was planning to live a little more comfortably, but after seeing the rent on my apartment in Berkeley next year, I thought it might be better to be a little more frugal.

Just playin'. But seriously, maybe it's because I only get to eat it in Germany, but döner is seriously the most delicious thing on earth. It's like a gyro, except the meat of indeterminate origin is slow-roasted for tons of flavor, the bread is some kind of wonderful crispy toasted flatbread, and it comes topped with three tons of cabbage and tomatoes and cucumbers and yogurt sauce. There approximately two döner stands on every city block in Germany, and you will never pay more than three euros for one sandwich. What's not to love?

I've already met with several MIT interns and gotten a couple great photo-ops and video interviews. One thing basically every American working in Germany has said is that Germans are way more blunt then Americans. Whereas an American might tell you in a business enviroment might tell you, "Well, this report is pretty good, but I have some issues with pages 5 and 7..." a German in the same situation might say, "Ach! What happened on pages 5 and 7? This is all wrong. This is not acceptable!" and then kick you in the shins.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this bluntness is on cigarette packaging. Somehow, even though you can't smoke anywhere in the US and you can smoke everywhere in Europe, US cigarette packing uses such absolutely precise language in its suggestion of the correlation between smoking and death. A label might read something like,

The surgeon general has suggested within a 95% confidence interval (z = 1.9) the existence of some linkage between consumption of cigarettes and low fetal birth weight in pregnant women aged 18 - 40, as referenced by P. Gupta and T. Cupertino, Journal of Statistical Biochemistry, Volume 18, Page 225, Published 1998."

Compare this to Germany where a package just says,

Rauchen kann tödlich sein.

"Smoking can be deadly." That's a little less equivocal. And yet everyone in Europe still smokes! Heck, in Italy they're even more direct. I saw a pack of cigarettes in a store last summer that just said, if memory serves me correctly,

Fumo tue.

Forgive me if the conjugation is a little off, but it basically just said, "Smoking kills."

Speaking of things that can kill you in Germany, I was in Leverkusen the other day visiting my old roommate Kunal at Bayer, and we walked by a poster for this summer's new Bruce Willis movie. Now, I pretty much already thought this movie had the greatest title of all time, primarily because I was in New Hampshire this month on a bike trip with my lab. The state motto there is "live free or die" which basically amounts to no taxes on beer and no mandatory seatbelt laws. It also led to conversations such as this one:

"Hey Andy, why aren't you wearing a seatbelt?"
"I'm living free."
"But you could die."
"That's within my rights. I'm in New Hampshire."
"Live free or die."
"Live free or die!"
"It sounds like an action movie. 'This summer, Samuel L Jackson will live free, or die."
"Ha, it could be the name of a Die Hard movie. Live Free or Die Hard."
"Wait, actually, I think that is the name of the new Die Hard movie."

So we decided that some movie producers were driving through New Hampshire one day, and they happened to see this license plate, and had this same conversation, and this is the only reason that there is a new Die Hard movie coming out this summer. But seriously, check out the advertisement in German.

Stirb Langsam 4.0. Which means Die Slowly 4.0.. And if Live Free or Die Hard isn't the best possibletitle for a movie that involves Bruce Willis blowing up a helicopter with a police car, the only title that could possibly be better is Die Slowly 4.0.

Die Slowly 4.0. Oh those Germans. So blunt.

Also, check out the new MISTIblogs! I was going to hold off on linking to them until I understood them a little better and got them up and running, but maybe this will motivate me to generate a little more content pronto.

I will generate content or die hard.

I started writing two entries while at home this week, but I was just never really in the state of mind to finish them. So, someday in August, just remind me that I owe you two entries, called...

Don't let it control you! about the work/play balance at MIT.
I'm bleeding this about my awesome 120-mile bike trip with Tester Lab.

I'm counting on you, Snively. And all you other commenters. It's just that Snively was the first one I remembered because his name is funny.

This past week has been pretty good. Well, I graduated from MIT. I was the most worried little kid, because we all had to line up at stations and get our names checked off, all of this at like 8:00 AM, so we could stand in line for two hours. I misread my major in haste and accidentally went to station the for Course 10B, which is chemical and biological engineering TOGETHER, which is basically just chemical engineering but you take out all the hard classes and replace them with introductory bio classes. Not that I'm biased. So I went there and I saw all the names on the list, and they were all my classmates, but I wasn't there! I just whimpered, "but, but, but these are all my classmates, and it says 'degree awarded' on the website, and I got graduation tickets, and and and..." So the guy there was basically just, "Okay, no worries, just go to this desk." And so I went there and they were like, "No, no, it's station 8, STUPID." So I went to station 8, which was the station for normal chemical engineering majors, and pretty much everything was fine. I spent graduation getting to page 104 in The Giver, making me the only person at MIT who was actually upset when they got finished with all 2,500 names, because it meant I had to stop reading. I feel like that could be some sort of metaphor for my voracious academic disposition, but I'm actually one of the three or four laziest people at MIT.

Then my family and I went to La Groceria, which has really awesome bruschetta but a terribly annoying noise on their website. See for yourself. BWAAAAA!!

And yeah, graduation was super sad or whatever. Luckily for me, I left all my packing until the last minute, so I was too busy frantically putting my room in twenty thousand tiny jars to worry about saying goodbyes, or missing people, or even processing the fact that I'm leaving my home in Boston for the next six years of my life.

BWAAAAA!!

But in the end, it was all good because I GOT TO GO TO HERSHEYPARK! Riding in the front seat of Storm Runner at 11 AM was the culmination of four years of regret of not coming home for the summer. And even if we had to run from actual storms later that evening, I still had one of the best sunny early afternoons in recent memory.

Also, Sam's Mom made this delicious cake and, as she rightly pointed out, if I were still my old blogging self, I would have taken a picture of it as soon as I saw it, which I've done with like 8 other food items she's cooked. It was delicious, but I have no picture. Hmm, maybe I can reproduce it in ASCII...

.........
/_____
|xxxxx|
|_____|

The periods are whipped cream, the x is delicious strawberry filling, and everything else is sweet, sweet cake. I would also probably have taken a picture of my face after eating it, which would look like this:

^_^

Because I am an anime hero.

By the way, never see the movie "Die You Zombie Bastards!" While I almost always agree with my friend Allison's movie selections, this was by far the single worst movie I have ever seen, ever. Seriously. Never see it. For any reason. I turned away from the screen in utter disgust like twelve times. There was only one redeeming quality, and that is that there was a character named Super Inge in the movie, and the morning after I saw it I had to call up someone named Inge to work out my flight reservations to Germany. But even that can hardly be attributed to the movie itself.

Oh! Germany! I ended up taking the job as MISTI reporter, so basically I'm getting paid to travel around Europe and interview MIT interns, then write about them. I really don't know how I managed that. You can hear all about it in this blog, or possibly a special MISTI blog, or possibly both at the same time, or possibly both at different times, or possibly I'll fall into a canal in Hamburg and get eaten by piranhas.

Just playin', Sam's Mom.

I look really bad with facial hair, but mine grows relatively fast, and I'm also terrible at shaving. So I've always told people that facial hair is my punishment for some terrible transgression in a past life. Surely then, this MISTI reporter job must be my reward for some awesome karma that I gathered in a different past life. Maybe as a friendly goat farmer in the Swiss Alps or a nurse during the American Civil War. Or maybe it's just my reward for namedropping Frau Sigrid "These Boots Are Made for Finding Internships" Berka in my blog last summer. I'm not too sure, really.

Just think about it for a second. I'm getting paid to go to Europe. To paraphrase a great woman, "I cannot believe this! Look what MIT can do."

In all honesty though, it wasn't until I actually went through and planned out all my visits that I realized what a logistical challenge this is all going to be. If I miss one train going anywhere, I might end up scrubbing dishes in Düsseldorf for the rest of my life. So, while I'm excited to get a six week paid vacation in Germany, I'm also scared out of my gourd right now.

I'm so excited!
I'm so excited!
I'm so ... scared.

This week sucks. Well, for everybody else it sucks, because they had finals. Ruth '07, Mitra '07 and I '07 tried to make that a little more tolerable for our floor by preparing one of Conner 2's patented senior finals breakfasts--every year, it's tradition that the seniors on Conner 2 make breakfast for the rest of the floor on the first day of finals. Since we can't half-ass anything on Conner 2, unless it's every problem set I turned in this semester, we totally blew every other senior breakfast in history away and rocked our floor with eggs benedict, a frittata, fresh fruit smoothies, maple-glazed bacon, homemade coffee cake, and fruit salad served in portable hollowed-out melon bowls. Basically, it's the greatest breakfast ever seen at MIT.

But after that? I'm at the start of a pretty big downer. First of all, finals are over, so I've just been sitting here watching everyone else on my floor leave MIT forever and their rooms get scrubbed clean by Rosa, our friendly Portuguese cleaning assistant. Second, my parents are here this weekend, and we've started packing up my room--never to be unpacked in Cambridge again. And finally, my beloved high school friend Shana stopped by to visit in Boston this week. Now, that's normally not such a big downer, but on Thursday I took her on a ten-hour walking tour of Boston that basically touched on every place in Boston I have ever been to, ever, including every random hole-in-the-wall restaurant that I've fallen in love with over the past four tears. And that, I have to say, was a little wistful. Like how Tim Gunn cries at the end of every season of Project Runway.

I think it all hit home last night, when we were standing in Toscanini's, which they New York Times has claimed, in some context-free quote, to serve "the best ice cream in the world." Seriously, it's not even the best ice cream in Boston--that would be J.P. Licks, but it was too hot to walk across the river last night. Anyway, I was enjoying the utterly bizarre avocado tequila ice cream when Shana noted that they had a Sunday brunch menu on the wall. "Yeah, I've never tried it." I said. "And, oh, nor will I ever, because I'm not going to be in Boston for the next two Sundays. Oh well."

So with all this going on right now, the moving and the packing and the touring, I feel kind of like a lonely Neko Case, standing onstage with my backing band and just sort of wailing "Blacklisted" into a red sky as an apocalypse of piano chords rains down around me. Slow down, fast train. Take me with you. That is what I am wailing.

Seriously, y'all. High School was slow. Slow slow slow! Slooooooooooooooow. S L O W. Okay, enough Lulu. But seriously. It was slow! Like, I was in high school for probably one thousand years, two hundred of which were spent just listening to our vice principal ominously call names to the office. MIT is like the craziest, bumpiest, fastest ride you will ever get on. Seriously. Wikipedia tells you Kingda Ka is the tallest, fastest, and most amazing roller coaster. And I hate to denigrate anything from New Jersey for fear of retribution by the mafia, or Laura, but the tallest, fastest, and most amazing roller coaster is an MIT education. I can't imagine anywhere else where I could have done more to pass the past four years more quickly or more ridiculously.

I remember this like it was yesterday--I had just met Ruthie '07 the previous night when I was walking to my room for only the second time ever and somehow ended up going across the river for terrible greasy pizza at 1 AM. I saw her again at the activities midway, and I didn't know anybody at MIT because I didn't go to CPW or do any pre-orientation programs (let that be a lesson, prefrosh), and I totally forgot her name. But whatever. There were balloon animals, she made a squirrel, but we pretended it was a monkey, and she named it Bruce, because it was green and had hulking arms. Then we took it back to her room, which was 222A at the time, and hung it up in the window, probably much to the amusement of her roommate, which at the time was Nicola '07.

I remember standing in the admissions office, mere steps from Ben Jones's door, and having a conversation with Sue and Mitra '07 about fingerling potatoes, and somehow turning that into a joke about how Mitra and I were going to run the Boston Marathon. And then I remember my first marathon, when my heart was just a-flutter as we walked a quarter mile down the street so the policemen wouldn't see us jumping in, and having an Odwalla Super Protein bar in my left pocket, which I ate while going over a bridge, and how Mitra basically carried my sore legs through the last 6 miles of the 2007 marathon.

I remember Lynn '05, and how she gave me my nickname, Spammy, within seconds of meeting me, and how she is still the most aggressively bizarre person I have ever met, and how we used to go on play-dates to restaurants in Harvard Square and Chilli Duck, and one time it was going to rain, and I thought that an insect crawled up my butt while I was walking down the street, and she was seriously concerned for me, but then it turned out everything was okay and we watched Zoolander. Then I remember saying goodbye to her after her graduation, and I only got to do that because I randomly saw her in the Prudential Center, and all she said was, "Okay, bye Spammy, by the way, take all my dishes! All my dishes, yah?"

I remember voting against Rick Santorum in Killian Court under what must have been the bluest sky in history. I remember taking differential equations homework on a ski trip Freshman year, and learning about laplace transforms while we melted skittles in a saucepan just to see what would happen. I remember meeting French Horn Guy within my first 6 hours at MIT, then never talking to him again until a beautiful reunion in a senior seminar. With Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Harbison. I remember buying a pair of pink pants on my first trip to Garment District, then destroying them because I forgot you don't iron polyester on high.

I remember taking my first two exams, 5.112 and 18.022, on the same day, and thinking I failed both of them, and having a weekend of terrible suspense and then finding out I got a 98 and 99 on them. Conversely, I remember getting a 40 on an exam and stapling a hole in my finger on the same day, and then blogging about it like two hours after that. I remember an exam with an average of 44, and a final that made people cry, that nobody was even working on when I looked around. I remember drawing a picture of one of my TAs playfully impaling the professor for that class with the flag of Italy and swearing at him in her delightful broken English. That was during a kind of boring lecture.

I remember losing at DDR during orientation in the basement of Random Hall to a guy who was wearing something like a roll of paper towels on his head. I remember the first time I went to Pour House, not on a Saturday because I didn't know any better, and Ruth got two hamburgers and I ate all the french fries because they're my favorite food. I remember walking across campus with Stella '07 to deliver one of her problem sets and retrieve my bike, and she saw some ice on the ground that someone had dumped out of a refrigerator, and she asked if it was snow, because she's from California and it was hilarious.

I remember when there used to be this really awesome fountain at the Christian Science Monitor building and the water shot out in a perfect torus, so if one of the spouts wasn't working you could crawl inside and run around under a spray of water, and how I've tried to go there on like five separate dates, but it's never turned on anymore.

Okay, so this has just turned into some stupid list of all my sad memories, like I'm some sort of emo Walt Whitman. But seriously, my point is that this is all one gigantic stupid sad memory in my mind, like I really just got here yesterday and made a green balloon monkey and bred fingerling potatoes while running a marathon and then started failing tests, and then I visited the Mary Baker Eddy library after a night at Harvard and then Ruth ate two Kansas's, much to our waitress's surprise, all before I pulled three consecutive all-nighters and my TA had to wake me up after a biochemistry lecture.

Readers, readers. Seriously, enjoy every single second you have at MIT, because there are far fewer than you think. EVERY SECOND! No pressure or anything.

Whoa, I just realized that an emo Walt Whitman would actually be pretty awesome.

I have Heard of a Glass, that can only spill that which in It is Contain'd.

There's more to say about leaving and what I'm thinking right now, but this entry is long and depressing enough, so I'll try to post an entry on American Idol or something in between.

Seriously, have you seen Kelly Clarkson's new video for "Never Again"? Love it!!

Okay, so it's been like a month. I don't know what happened, dawg. I don't even have some great, 1,000-googol-page-long entry saved up for you. Actually this entry did end up being kind of long, but it's not quite 1,000 googol pages.

All I can offer you by way of reconciliation is this song.

But apart from listening to that song, I am a sad sad toaster made of glass this term. I'm leaving MIT! It's totally sad. I just walk around and I'm like, "Oh no! It's the last time ever I'm going to forget to go to the Concert in Bad Taste. Or go on the Burton-Conner boat cruise. Or see a movie for $3 at LSC. Or bring up singularities in everyday conversation. Or something like that." And then I get real sad, so I go back to my room, lock the door, and play NES on my laptop.

But last week I was truly, truly inconsolable about something completely unexpected: last Friday I turned in my last problem set ever at MIT.

So the other day I was bored because I woke up and had like three hours before class when I didn't plan anything to do, so after playing Crystalis for two hours, I decided to make a graph of the number of credit-hours of class I've taken per term since coming to MIT. The results were intriguing:

Don't you love all those excellent chart-formatting skills I learned in 10.26: Chemical Engineering Project Laboratory? Really, I didn't use them as much as Steph '07, who made the ten thousand different meticulously labeled graphs demanded by Professor Preetinder S. Virk. But I digress. As any good engineer would, I decided to use these results to predict the number of units I would be taking next term at MIT. So, I added a trendline in the form of a fifth-degree polynomial, because it's well-known that work varies as the fifth power of time. And whatnot.

Perfect! Empirical data agrees with my model. I will indeed be taking zero units at MIT next term, since I'm headed to UC Berkeley for grad school. Of course, the data also predicts that I'll be taking negative 80 units the term after that, which should be AWESOME. What I expect to happen is that MIT will invent time travel, and then JKim will steal it using her ninja skills. So then she'll come get me at Berkeley, and after going back in time and preventing the Spanish Civil War, we'll come back to MIT and relive my entire MIT experienceexcept at night I'll go back to Berkeley and do my problem sets. So the time that I spend at MIT, which will add up to 80 hours per week of real world time, will actually count as NEGATIVE TIME. SEE WHAT STATISTICS CAN DO FOR YOU?

But this entry was about problem sets at one point. Problem sets. And zombies. Zombies and toasters. And water. And friendship. And the whole world.

I think the point was that I'm taking so few units this term, and so I really don't have any problem sets! Ever. Like, ever. Well, I had a total of ten problem sets this term. I know people who have ten problem sets a week! But they have serious problems, no fun, and NO-DOZ addictions that they proudly chronicle on their blogs, and they also confuse the concepts of work, education, and happiness.

But in my busiest term, I had four problem sets per week, three of which were due on Friday. That was the term that I basically pulled an all-nighter every Thursday and watched more old episodes of Captain Planet (5 AM weekdays on UPN!) than I probably watched when Captain Planet was in its first run. Two terms ago, even though I only had three problem set classes, one of those had problem sets that were routinely 20 or more pages long. One time Megan '08 woke me up on the floor of her suite. She was all, "Sam, you passed out on the floor [and you're sprawled out amidst three notebooks and hugging your laptop, which is still on, so it doesn't get stolen; also, you don't even live here]." And I was all, "So?" And then I went back to sleep. On the floor. Because I had to go to German in 40 minutes, and there was no way I'd ever get up again if I went to bed.

And yet I was still writing all these blog entries back then! Like, three or four every week! And training for a marathon! What was I, Superdude?

Seriously, the most productive thing I did today was beat Crystalis.

So I just went on about problem sets for like three paragraphs, and how stressed out I was. And the point is that I'm going to miss this, because problem set sessions are like the single quintessential MIT social experience that every single undergrad has. You're up late at night and working on some heat and mass transfer in the floor lounge, canceling terms out of the Navier-Stokes equation, while the girl next to you does quantum physics and somebody else is writing his final philosophy paper, and every so often this freshman, who's using MATLAB to model differential equations, opens up some random YouTube video or something, so you watch an exploding whale on a Welsh beach, or he plays "Don't Stop Me Now" by Queen and everyone knows all the words and sings along. And one by one everybody finishes or gives up and heads off to bed, giving you a sympathetic "good night", until it's 3:30 AM and it's just you and the Navier-Stokes equation, and you wish that you had started earlier, and contemplate whether it's even feasible e-mail the TA, or if you should start on your circuits problem set, or whether you should just worry about that later, and then you don't remember what happened next but somehow the sun is rising and you're looking at the entry for "Since U Been Gone" on Wikipedia.

So that happens like once a week, every single week, for your first three and a half years at MIT.

And so Thursday night I actually had two problem sets to do, but they only grade 5 out of 6 problem sets in 10.494: ICE-T3 and the professor was basically like, "Hey, seniors, why don't you just skip one of the last two problem sets!" I was going to do both, but it was like 10 PM. So I did what was probably the shortest problem set I've ever done at MIT, trudging my way through some possibly-working MATLAB code and four pages of differential equations in about two hours.

And I was just sitting there in my suite lounge, looking at the last problem set that I ever turned in at MIT. Ever! The last one! Who would have thought, four years ago when I first Mastered Physics, that I would get to the last problem set that I would ever turn in at MIT. And I looked at what a shoddy job I did with it. But seriously, it was like 12 AM, and I was going to get a B in the class no matter how well I did on it. I really couldn't motivate myself to look at the theoretical implications of three-phase mass transfer in a continuously stirred tank reactor any longer. Somehow this term I really lost something.

So I did the next best thing: I wandered across the floor to the 213 suite, where Laura '09, Dizzle '09, and Richard '09 were working on their problem sets, which they actually cared about because they're sophomores. So I parked myself on their couch and fell asleep to the sweet sounds of their melodious voices discussing transfer functions and rigidity and Hamiltonians, dreaming about a time when I could have joined them for one of the greatest all-night tools of all time.

This entry probably scares you, doesn't it? TOO BAD, YOU ALREADY MATRICULATED AT MIT, SUCKA!

So it's not like a little wind and rain is going to stop them from running it tomorrow. Look, guys, I know I'm doing a biofuels UROP and everything, and I love the MIT energy initiative or whatever just as much as President Susan Hockfield, but I'm sick of hearing about global warming when I check out the weather report in mid-April and this is what I get...

I've been much more of lame-o about running outside since I got a MacBook and the above information was available to me with a simple push of F12. In case I did something stupid and you can't see the picture, basically, it says 42 degrees, raining, and crazy windy. So I was sitting at Burton-Conner desk today earning $9 an hour and contemplating whether or not I should run the Boston Marathon tomorrow (I've been training since September), when I got this e-mail from Mitra.

From: Mitra Longshoreman
To: All of Mitra and Sam's Mutual Friends
Time: 17:29 3/15/07
Subject: Marathon Monday

Hey everyone,

Despite the gross weather tomorrow, Sam and I will be attempting to run in the
Boston Marathon. If you can brave the rain, we'd really appreciate it if you
could come cheer on the runners.

I'll be wearing black capris, red jacket, and maroon MIT cap; if the fashion
police don't pull me over, we expect to pass through Kenmore Square between
2:20 and 3:00.

Thanks & hope to see you tomorrow!

Mitra

...which pretty much committed me right then and there.

No, really, Mitra's e-mail didn't push me over the edge. Sam's Mom already made a 300-mile journey northward to see me, so I couldn't let her down by skipping out.

No, no, not really. Beyond all my obligations to Mitra's friends and Sam's Mom, I'm hella excited about running 26.2 miles tomorrow. I feel like the wind and rain whipping in the faces of thousands upon thousands of runners is going to form some sort of crazy unbreakable bond between us that I will remember for my entire life. Plus, if I can run a marathon in sleet and get a degree from MIT within 90 days of each other, really, what can I not do?

True story: I walked into the floor lounge tonight to ask if I could borrow some nice fleecy running pants, which I eventually got from, of all people, Dizzle '09. Blogger Laura '09, who's an EMT from New Jersey, is going to be working at Mile 23 tomorrow. She showed me her EMT handbook, which was open to the page about how to resuscitate hypothermics. Oh, I just can't wait.

I can't promise a McGannesque liveblog, but I'll try to post tomorrow night letting you know that I lived through the ordeal and ended up learning the true meaning of determination. Or that I lost three toes. Something like that.

Also, thanks to all the awesome prefrosh that I met during CPW. I was going to try to have a kind of "hands-off" CPW, but you kids were so awesome that I just couldn't manage to stay in my dorm room, and I think my weekend was a lot happier for it. Special thanks for reading my blog and recognizing me, even though I only blog like once per equinox now. You should go back and read my old entries, when I was actually diligent, and clever.

Anyhoo, by the time you read this, I'll probably be in Hopkinton. Think warm thoughts for me, like Asok would.

Wow, Super Energy Pill would be an awesome band name.

Uh, sorry about that last blank entry. I'm looking for the "rebuild" button to get rid of it from all your displays, but I can't really find it and it's 2:43 AM, so that's probably not going to happen. I'm kind of tired because I just spent the day with Ruthie '07, Lauren '08 and Jeff 'G playing hookey in New York City. Ruthie scored some tickets to The Colbert Report because she is lucky and I am not, and since New York is only a 4-hour Fung Wah Bus ride away from Boston, we decided to head down for the most awesome school-skipping adventure of all time.

Actually, Senior Skip Day at my high school was pretty sweet too, except in a different way, because it ended in a Red Robin in Central PA rather than Rice to Riches, New York City's hippest $5 rice pudding joint.

But it was all worth it, if for no other reason, because I got to have a 13-word conversation with Stephen Colbert--before the show, Stephen takes a few questions from the studio audience, who are instructed to all have really creative questions beforehand. A lot of the ones around us were kind of stupid, like, "Why don't you mention GOOGLE BOMBING on your show? The Colbert Nation would LOVE that because they totally haven't done enough ridiculous things, like that bridge in Norway!" and "If bears are the number one threat to America and Bill O'Reilly is 'Papa Bear,' does that mean HE'S the number one threat to America?"

I mean, once you hear my question it's kind of a judge not lest ye be judged kind of thing, but still.

Since I was young, or at least since I wrote my biography for this blog, it's been my dream to have a unit of measurement in the metric system named after me. Now, my floor is amazing, so one day when I was not home they decided to define one. The maurer is a unit of awesomeness, equal to the awesomeness of me playing one note of Trogdor on Guitar Hero II. The entire song, including the wild scream of "...and the Trogdor comes in the niiiiiiiiiight" at the end, is equal to 0.8 kilomaurer.

This eventually became a convention that we extended to every member of the floor. For example, the dizzle is a unit of innocence, the lopez is a unit of dedication, and the miller is a unit of bad decision making. Perhaps my favorite is the tang, which measures orthogonality to conversation direction.

Anyway, we're interviewing new GRT's (like RA's at other colleges, but they're graduate students and probably cooler) for next year, so we decided it would be a good idea to ask them this question at every GRT interview we conduct. We've gotten a variety of very revealing responses, such as "a unit of old-man clothes" or "a unit of taking people's vices and addictions and enabling them just to see what happens, but not in a dangerous way."

Really, I don't think either of those people is going to be our GRT next year.

So Ruthie '07 decided that this would be our question to Stephen. Anticipating his migration over to our side of the studio audience, I raised my hand excitedly and looked RIGHT AT HIM. Luckily, I was wearing my flamboyant red corduroy jacket specifically because I thought such an occasion might arise today. Also because it's an awesome jacket and cost only three dollars. And so we had the following discourse:

ME: "If the colbert were a unit of measurement, what would it measure?"
STEPHEN COLBERT: [pensively] "Ball."
ME: [pfft]

If I'm being honest, it wasn't the most brilliant comedic answer ever given, but since I was expecting "freedom" it was a nice surprise. Also, you know the old adage--ask a stupid question, get a CHANCE TO TALK TO STEPHEN COLBERT!

Ruthie '07 only later came up with the idea that I should have asked him whether to pick Berkeley or Stanford for grad school. That would have made this whole decision business a lot easier (shoot, three more days!).

Anyhoo, I'm going to be covered in fur in, uh, oh snap, five hours, so I think I'm just going to wash some dishes and head off to bed. If you're coming to CPW, check out the international panel at 4 PM. I think it's in 34-101 on Thursday and 32-141 on Friday. It'll be great and eye-opening, and not just because I'll be speaking on it.

Until tomorrow night, I GOT TO SEE STEPHEN COLBERT! WHOOOOOOOO!!

Hokay, so I still do exist and I still do blog once in a while. I've been feeling kind of floaty these past few weeks, like there's a quote from The Unbearable Lightness of Being to describe my current situation, but I can't remember it because I didn't end up liking that book as much as I hoped.

God, I sound like Paula Abdul.

Guys, I have a great joke.

Q: Why was six afraid of seven?
A: Because seven ate nine.

Q: Why was seven afraid of eight?
A: Mathematical induction.

But seriously, guys, everything's really up in the air right now. I've got six days to choose a grad school. I've got it narrowed down to the sketchy liberal slums of UC Berkeley and the sprawling Spanish resort paradise of Stanford. But it's hard--grad school is different because you don't only have to choose a place to spend then next five years of your life, you also have to find an adviser to whom you can relinquish control of you academic future. There's one dude at Stanford, Tom Jaramillo, who I'd really like to relinquish myself to. But then at Berkeley I see some awesome atmospheric chemistry stuff, and, well, it's hard, unlike choosing MIT for undergrad. You know it!

More immediately, I have no summer plans. This afternoon I met with the incomparable Dr. Sigrid Berka, who found me my summer internship in Germany last summer. It's kind of too late to find an internship in another country right now, which is cool because my one requirement for a job this summer is NOT TECHNICAL. So she suggested that I just go around Germany interviewing other interns and blogging and getting paid by MIT. Well, that's not too bad a deal. But tomorrow I'm heading down to JP Licks for free scoop day. The last time I was there, there was a "help wanted" sign--so I'm hoping it'll still be there and that the place won't be too crowded for me to pick up an application. I'm actually hoping for kind of a combination of the two at this point--actually, my dream would probably be to travel around Europe scooping ice cream for different MIT students. Since every third store in Germany is, by law, an Eiscafe, it's actually kind of a feasible dream.

Also of interest, I went camping with Conner 2 this weekend.

There was also a cabin to stay in, but, you know, we're not losers. I am, however, kind of clumsy, because somehow in between buying some delicious Apple Dapples in New Hampshire and leaving the cabin, I managed to misplace my wallet. Luckily, I saved my MIT ID, which is good because all MIT IDs printed after 2008 make me want to hurl when I look at them. Sorry, it's true. Anyhoo, I'm pretty sure I know where I left it in the cabin, so I just have to wait until the cabin is inhabited again so I can ask people to look for it. I'm actually not too worried about losing my driver's license or anything, because the picture's bad, and there was only one dollar in the wallet itself. So I might have to get my debit card replaced, at worst. But I had a free movie coupon for LSC that I earned by paying full price for ten movies, and also I was only one falafel away from a free falafel at the Couscous Kitchen food truck. I feel totally naked now.

In the meantime, I'm really super glad that I have a passport, because Ruth '07 awesomely scored tickets to see The Colbert Report on Wednesday, so we're skipping all of our classes and making a $15 Chinatown bus trip down to New York City to see it. Covet!

Anyway, I have like 87 German-related assignments to do for tomorrow, because I'm the biggest slacker on Earth. Oh, it's true. But remember, don't you start slacking this last quarter just because you got into MIT or anything--if Marilee Jones catches you slacking, she'll come to your house and kill your dog.

For fun.

So don't push her!

What a coincidence that Matt's entry on thanking parents came on Sam's Mom's birthday! Happy birthday, Sam's Mom!

Anyway, you may have seen the MIT homepage today when you were like, "ARRRRRGHUS!! I NEED TO KNOW IF I GOT IN TO MIT!! MAYBE THEY SPONTANEOUSLY DECIDED TO POST THEIR ADMISSION DECISIONS AT 10:37 PM TODAY! URAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!" In doing so, you may have noticed that it was advertising the MIT Coal Study, an interdisciplinary work prepared by some of MIT's most noted energy professors detailing the future of fossil fuels in the United States. Although renewable fuels and turkey carcasses are awesome and everything, considering that like 3% of our current energy comes from renewable sources, to be honest, we aren't going to satisfy the 10^18 Joules per year that the US needs in a sustainable fashion anytime soon. So, until we get a big sustainable infrastructure in place, coal--with carbon sequestration in place--might not be a bad transitional solution.

But speaking of sustainable energy, I just found out that Biodiesel@MIT, a student group started by Joe '08 and eventually joined by just about everybody I've ever met, just won a $25,000 grant from MTVU and GE. Seriously! $25,000! Won by somebody whose house I have been inside! ARGH! All I've been doing tonight is sitting in my room listening to Ween, meanwhile Joe '08 won $25,000 to save MIT.

So I got this e-mail this morning from my 10.491: Integrated Chemical Engineering II professor, Dr. Gregory "take your hands off the keyboard" McRae.

Dear 10.491 ICE Students:

Yesterday in Washington we released the MIT "Future of Coal" report -- there was a lot of interest in the findings and especially the involvement of Course 10 ICE students. I will present a summary of the findings in class on Monday. In the mean time your can see the report itself at

web.mit.edu/coal (See today's MIT spash page and in particular look at the Acknowledgements Section. You may also recognize the table of numbers in Box 1 of the Executive Summary --they were derived from your answers to Homework problem number 1)

or just a few of the press articles at

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&ncl=1114446307

I will see you in class on Monday, have a good weekend and remember the final report is due very soon!!

Cheers

Greg

Last year's senior class had the opportunity to contribute to this report with their 10.491 projects. We, on the other hand, are still contributing to the future of coal research at MIT, because Professor McRae is kind of a big deal.

But what have I contributed? Oh, basically nothing, I feel like! I've been on grad school visits for the past 3 weeks, which are basically like CPW except with even more free stuff and free airfare, and swanky hotel rooms instead of the floor in my dorm room. Thanks to my visit to California last weekend, I now have sunburn to the point where my skin is peeling off, and it's 30 degrees outside. It's surreal. I think my group would beat my face, if they weren't all really nice girls who live in Next House.

Anyway, the moral of the entry is that you shouldn't pick a Calfiornia school over MIT, because you will probably get sunburn and die.

I had this rule that I would write a blog entry before I would allow myself to play Super Smash Bros. Melee tonight, but I think I should change that to write like 10 pages of our final report before I write a blog entry, before I play Super Smash Bros. Melee.

Also, this entry will be updated by tomorrow morning. I promise!

Today, 3/4, is unofficially national marching band day. Get it? Anyway, to celebrate, I was going to do an entry about the MIT marching band's slush-infested Valentine's day crusade to deliver something like 2,000 love-infested "band-o-grams," but my good friend Ben is in Boston this weekend visiting some college or other, so I probably won't get a chance to do it tonight. Anyway, blame Ben, because I am infallible. But I at least wanted to start writing today because there's only one national marching band day per year. So until I get a chance to get all the pictures together, here's a poem I wrote when I was seven:

Seen in Winter
Never Summer
Oh, he's melting.
What, he's water?
Mr. Snowman is gone
After the fun
Now it's snowing, make him again!

I think it's basically the greatest artistic achievement of my short life.

--

Hokay. So. Nine days and 10,000 miles of flight later, I'm finally about ready to finish up this entry on marching band with some pictures.

So, to answer all of your questions, here is the marching band in its full 14-member glory. I think in total we have about 20-25 people who are associated with the band on a rotating basis, but most performance days range around 16 due to MIT students' busy schedules, and the fact that most of the events are on Saturday afternoons, which means like 3 people oversleep every week.

Also of note: the awesome drum cart that our clarinet player, Michael '09, built for us. Since we don't have enough percussion players to have, you know, more than just a snare drum, we decided to lug a trap set everywhere we go with us. The cart rolls along the ground with great ease, and can also be fitted into any set of bleachers that MIT can throw at us.

One instrumentalist who I forgot to mention in my earlier breakdown of the band is Mary Beth '10! She plays piano! In a marching band. We can't really afford a marimba or glockenspiel or anything, so, engineers that we are, we adapted a snare drum harness into a 1986 Casio Keyboard harness, outfitted her with an amplifier and battery pack, and told her to play whatever she wanted. Sometimes when the drummer gets tired of making up a cadence, we just let her use one of the preset drum beats so we can keep time marching. My favorite is "samba!"

And even dragging like 20 pounds of electrical equipment around, Mary Beth was still unafraid to march around Boston on the slushiest day of the year 2007. In order to spread some love and, more importantly, make some money, the band decided to sell "band-o-grams" to unsuspecting MIT students. Basically it meant that you give us $15 and we show up wherever you want on campus and play your beloved a song. Example songs included a vocal version of "All You Need Is Love" and "Dragostea Din Tei."

No, really, the MIT marching band plays Dragostea Din Tei. As trombonist Caroline '08 put it, "I think we should play only the numa numa song, and not only would I never get sick of it, I would enjoy it even more each time."

Earlier that night we needed something from a printer, so we had our tubist Ken head into the cluster and grab it. That was more of an ordeal than you can surmise even from this picture.

In conclusion, the MIT marching band is the greatest musical group of the new millenium and will probably win a Grammy before you die.

I have discovered this on my way back from a West Coast chemical engineering graduate school of some repute. My return flight through Chicago was cancelled due to Chicago being buried under 20 stories of golfball-sized hail with frogs inside. Or at least that's what I have chosen to believe. So I'm flying back to Boston by way of Portland, Oregon and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. No, I don't know why. Perhaps The Madman Who Makes People Fly had something to do with my flight scheduling.

Anyway, as I see it, I've got three things to celebrate:
1. Free wireless
2. Jennifer Hudson just won an Academy Award
3. I am eating french fries dipped into Frosty right now and they are delicious

So, to celebrate, tomorrow I'm going to update this entry to blog about my CLASS SCHEDULE for this term! In the meantime, I'll be reading Schachnovelle by Stefan Zweig on my overnight redeye (or are those two things mutually exclusive?).

Catch you on the East Coast!

--

Word. So, my visit went pretty well--although I was a little surprised by how different the school's research philosophy was from that of MIT, I guess after four years it might be nice to get a different perspective on my major. Plus, you can't really beat the weather--I ran up what must have been 2,000 miles of hills with MIT alum Priya '05 on Saturday wearing only shorts and a t-shirt. In February! Anyway, the worst part of the whole ordeal was the 25 hour odyssey it took to get from my hotel room to my bed in Burton-Conner.

It took me over 5 minutes to spell the word "odyssey" correctly.

Anyway, as promised, here are my thoughts on my (three) classes this term. Hey, I must be 66% as awesome as Bryan!

10.392J: Fundamentals of Advanced Energy Conversion -- What a cool name for a class. I feel so smart just being in a class with that name, to be honest. Anyway, so far it's just been a review of all the energy and thermodynamics classes that I've already taken, except kind of stuck together, like maybe spot-welded together. But in the end Joe '08 and I get to write an AWESOME 20-page report together, which should be really fun because he's a junior and still cares about grades! This is also the first grad class that I'm taking on purpose at MIT.

10.491 -- Integrated Chemical Engineering II -- I found out this weekend that every other school in the country just calls this "design" or "process operations," but at MIT, where all but the hardest classes are designated with numbers, it just sounds so much more fearsome to call it "ICE." Anyway, ICE isn't actually as hard as it's made out to be. In fact, I wish I could take it for the next 8 semesters; that way I would eventually be in "ICE-nine." Oh man, I'm clever. But seriously, folks, this class rocks this term. Instead of using some made-up data for our project, we're modeling actual coal plants using Aspen and contributing to an MIT Coal Study that will actually be presented to the US Department of Energy by our professor. How bad can that be?

21F.404: German IV -- OH MAN THIS CLASS IS SO HARD. Seriously, it's stomping a mudhole in me. I think the problem is that German I, II, and III were mostly filled with Americans who were learning broken German, and then they all decided to stop taking German, leaving Ling and I stuck with a bunch of native speakers who use the phrase "überhaupt nicht" like it's going out of style. Luckily, I have one more Junior-Senior P/D/F option left. Also, as a point of interest, the Chinese department introduced the streamlined option to prevent native speakers from making everybody feel as depressed as I do, every single day in German IV.

See any other interesting classes in the course catalog that you could recommend to me? Guess what? I'm not going to take them! Whoooo! Seniors!

But do like Marilee Jones said and don't stop working just because you got into MIT--you have to wait until you get into grad school before you can start slacking.

I have taken a cue from fellow blogger Lulu and changed my name to Samsam Siam. No no, I've actually just taken all the spare pictures from last month that I had meant to blog and assembled them together into one photo entry so I can move on with my blogging life (and believe me, this time I'm really gonna move it!). My pictures aren't quite as good as Lulu's, but American Idol is on and Nicole Tranquillo seriously looks like she's having a heart attack right now, so I'm too distraught to fix them at all.

This is Lauren, who was incredibly pink at the extraordinary holiday dinner party for Course 17: Political Science. Look, MIT has not only girls, but also a political science department. Before your mind even goes there, Lauren is NOT EVEN a political science major--she's just a minor! My own connection to political science is even more tenuous (I was pretending to be Ruth's date and she's a minor) but that didn't stop me from eating like 47 free peking duck spring rolls.

I also took some pictures of my own outfit at the dinner, but I decided that posting them here would be a little gratuitous. Suffice to say that I think purple, red, green, and gold is a perfectly valid color combination.

This person is MIT '10 and he came down from Hazleton, PA to visit me in Harrisburg over winter break, which is the second time that something like that has happened. Like Moria '06 and Friends before him, I managed to get him hopelessly lost within like 20 minutes of my house. Also he untags pictures of himself on facebook in which he thinks he looks bad, so he'd probably have to crash the MIT admissions server if I named him here.

After getting some reasonably-priced Harrisburg cheesesteak, we checked out the State Museum of Pennsylvania, where we saw this proud beaver preserved through the miracle of taxidermy (or maybe it's just a fake model; I'm not too sure really). Of course, I had to take its picture.

Here is the same beaver hiding in its dark underground beaver hole. He must be a Course 10 major using Aspen to finish his problem set in the basement of Building 66,

After seeing Dreamgirls later that afternoon, nothing happened to me for like two weeks. Oh, except I saw this Futurama clip and laughed for like three or four days straight.

But then I got to go to the Pennsylvania Farm Show, the world's largest indoor agricultural exhibition, which takes place a 5-minute drive away from my house. Have you ever noticed that, according to this blog, everything cool in the entire world happens within a 30 minute radius of me?

Probably the most awesome thing about the farm show is the greasy food peddled by friendly mennonites. My high school friend Ben thinks that the point of the farm show is to consume as much food as possible within 5 minutes without throwing up. As you can see above, to achieve this end he does not close his gaping maw even for one second while in the food court.

Seriously though, the milkshakes will make you feel like my high school friend Allison.

Not like my high school friend Michael J here, who is not excited by most things, except the band Gogol Bordello.

Of course, most farmshowgoers think that THE SUPREME GRAND CHAMPION is the coolest thing there. Personally, I like the champion Asiatic chicken better...

...but then again I am drawn to shiny and colorful things, like a hungry ostrich.

Actually, you ought to watch out for the champion Asiatic chicken.

How about an alpaca? Here my beloved high school friend Shana, the supreme grand champion of my heart, pets this adorable little booger.

And here's this year's model of the famous farm show butter sculpture! BUTTER. This year it was Benjamin Franklin inspecting the Liberty Bell. And as a supreme grand champion of the environment myself...

...I was excited to find that this year's entire butter sculpture is being converted into biodiesel for consumption in Pennsylvania farm equipment! DID YOU KNOW? that Biodiesel@mit, a new club or, uh, something started by my friend Joe '08 (maybe my ex-friend after that description) is now one of the Top 10 finalists in a national contest sponsored by GE and MTVU?

Go vote for Biodiesel@mit!

Now Joe '08 will be my friend again.

YOU GET VASELINE!

Wow, it's been a while!

Wow, I've been saying that at the beginning of basically every single blog entry in recent memory. Anyway, I learned in high school that excuses are like dirty underwear: we all have them and they all stink, and also you can use them again if you turn them inside out. But the point is: no excuses. So I'll just apologize for being derelict in my blogging over the past few months and get right down to business.

What's happened since you last heard from your hero? Well, lots! I took 10.391: Sustainable Energy and learned that we're all doomed! DOOMED. I was admitted to four graduate schools. I delivered something like 8 or 9 Valentine's Day band-o-grams on the slushiest day of the past decade. I helped teach Susan Hockfield how to play Wii Tennis. But by far the most awesome thing I did since the year 2007 began was almost auditioning for The Amazing Race 12.

Oh man, I just checked that site and saw that JVJ got eliminated first on The Amazing Race: All Stars! Okay, now I'm definitely not watching.

Unfortunately, even after a year and a half of blogging, I still don't qualify as an star, so I was stuck going to auditions for the star-free season 12. My local CBS affiliate, WHP-CBS, was holding auditions at the Harrisburg East Mall, which is like 5 minutes away from my house unless you're driving a car that I'm navigating, in which case it takes like 20 minutes. But The Amazing Race has always been my absolute favorite reality show, and it was one of only two shows that I could make time to watch during my first two years at MIT. So, really, how could I resist? I called up my beloved high school friend Shana--since she spent an entire semester of her undergraduate studies in Cameroon learning how to be a global citizen, I figured that something like eating live octopus in South Korea or caber tossing in the Scottish highlands would be absolutely no problem for her.

Our first step was filling out the application, which in and of itself was pretty awesome. The first question was like, "How did you meet your partner?" I was kind of stuck at that, but Shana instantly replied, "In a spelling bee!" referring to our showdown in the final rounds of the 5th grade spelling bee at Herbert Hoover Elementary School. So we went with that. According to Shana, the most difficult moment in our relationship was the outcome of that spelling bee, although I don't think we actually spoke again for like another two years. Although maybe that's why!

But we knew that "Former Spelling Bee Winner and Runner-Up" wouldn't sound that impressive among a field of contestants that has included "Friends/Professional Circus Clowns," "Beauty Queen/Former POW" and "Dating 12 Years/Virgins". We decided to call ourselves the "really judgmental team," and listed some of our hobbies as "bickering like old Jewish yentls" and "making fun of other people on camera". I mean, what better way to get on a reality show? However, Sam's Mom convinced us that this would probably be a bad idea, so instead we just decided to be "college graduates" who needed the money to pay back all of our student loans. Although, really, thanks to MIT's generous need-based financial aid, I really don't have as much to pay back as you'd expect.

My favorite two questions on the survey were probably "What famous personality do you remind yourself of?" and "What famous personality does your partner remind you of?" Shana put down Madonna ("sanctimonious, but ultimately good at heart") and Benjamin Franklin ("also, he invented bifocals"), while I wrote down Ian McKellen ("flamboyant but totally bad-ass") and Patti Smith ("except without the heroin addiction"). I mean, seriously, how could you deny a team composed of Patti Smith/Madonna and Ian McKellen/Benjamin Franklin?

So the auditions started at 10 AM, but Shana had some things to do that morning with her sister before she headed back to college in Baltimore. I value family togetherness more than one million dollars, so we decided not to get there until around 11 AM. Anyway, Sam's Mom probably wouldn't have let us get there at 5 AM ("Sam, people get shot in that parking lot."), so I really had no qualms about the fact that we didn't show up until around 11:20. As we were walking in to the mall, we noticed two people walking out with matching purple custom-made American Apparel t-shirts that had their names on them and a crest proudly stating, "WINNERS OF THE AMAZING RACE 2007". So, you know, even these people did not get into the three-minute-long audition room until a full hour after auditions started. That should have been our first clue, really.

So the Harrisburg East Mall is not even the main mall in Harrisburg, PA--nobody really goes there anymore except to the Bass Pro Shop, the Chick-Fil-A closed down, and, as Sam's Mom noted, people get shot in the parking lot. So I wasn't expecting people to come out to this little podunk mall from farther than, say, York. Or maybe, well, Scranton. When we got into the mall, we noticed that, quite in contrast to the usual patronage, there was now a massive line spanning the entire length of the mall and also going through some stores. Hmm.

So we walked the entire length of the mall and settled back into what must have been the 787th and 788th places in line. Since my mutant power is eavesdropping on conversations, I noticed that most of the discussion back in this part of the line was confined to "Hmm, I wonder how many people are in line?" and "If it takes 3 minutes to do an audition, they will probably get done with 15 teams of 2 per hour." and "That means it will take them 8 hours to get to us." and "I wonder if they'll be staying longer than 3 PM to accommodate everyone." Upon closer listening, I found that the people behind us were from State College, and they were trying to get here 3 hours ago, but they got lost. The people behind them had a similar experience, except they were from Cleveland, Ohio and drove all night to get here in time.

So I think about 15 minutes later Shana and I decided that this just wasn't going to work out... this time, but we resolved to stay for about an hour for the sake of staying the course, by which we really meant so we could watch funny people. And, oh, did we get an opportunity for that. I counted at least two dozen tie-dye shirts (seriously, people, there was already a Rupert), and about 30 minutes after we walked in another group entered wearing full Native American tribal regalia. I can only hope that they didn't drive around for 6 hours in that. We saw girls who had "a really cute audition video" ready try to bribe their way to the front of the line, and scores of bored-looking security guards and disgruntled Payless Shoe Store workers.

But probably our favorite group was the team directly in front of us, who were carrying two large picture frames that they kept, very secretively, face-to-face so that no other team could see what was inside. Shana and I spent the whole 80 minutes we were in line guessing as to what could possibly be in the frames--pictures of their dead grandparents? Portraits of Phil Keoghan they had drawn themselves? The first dollars they ever earned? Finally, when we abandoned our amazing dreams (we reached an athletic shoe store called Finish Line and took it as a message from some higher power) Shana decided to ask exactly what prop they had brought with them, "Well," one of them clarified as his girlfriend walked up and put her arm around him, "we're from Schenectady, New York and we majored in geography in college, so we brought our degrees with us, because what will they ever be good for except for The Amazing Race?! Ha ha ha! Wait, you're leaving." We just responded, "Yeah, we live 5 minutes from here. Good luck! Bye."

And really, I don't feel bad about leaving, because if anyone who auditioned in Harrisburg should get in, it should be the two geography majors from upstate New York who drove five hours to get there and then waited 8 hours despite a 600-person long line, especially because one of them was asian and there's really not enough diversity on reality television. They're pretty much better candidates than I am in every conceivable way. So if you see a half-Asian team of geography majors on The Amazing Race 12, you'll know where they came from!

Still, Shana and I didn't come out of the experience without an important life lesson. And that lesson was, "Lots of crazy people want to be on TV, so probably every person you see on Survivor or The Amazing Race majorly changed their life around for at least 2 days just so they could get an audition."

And that will just make me like The Amazing Race even more.

By now I think there should be a category called "e-mails that Sam has received from Hillel, who still mistakenly think he is Jewish." But there's not, so this will go in Miscellaneous.

From: Irving Spiderman
To: pi-pi-pie@mit.edv
Date: 01-25-07 1:00 PM
Subject: pi, Pi, pie. TONIGHT.

Like Pi? or "Pi"? How about Pie?

TONIGHT, 7:30pm at the Hillel Center in w11.

Join MIT Hillel for an evening packed to the brim with pi. We'll view the movie "Pi", while simultaneously enjoying a dinner of pizza pies. To top the evening off we'll have a Pi competition; the person who knows the most digits of Pi will be rewarded with a Pie!

Come for the pie, stay for the pi.

Only at MIT Hillel.

Unfortunately, I missed it because I was running 3 miles on a treadmill in the Burton-Conner cardio room. Normally this is the worst thing in all recorded history (in fact, on my running log, I have "FREAKING BC TREADMILL" written for the last time I used it) but, thanks in part to the Undergraduate Association, MIT now gets Comedy Central! Do you know what that means? I can watch The Colbert Report, just like a real college student! And so I did on the really old cardio room TV, nearly falling off the treadmll as I squinted to read "The Word" without my glasses.

Also, I don't know if it can possibly be a coincidence, but Comedy Central is channel 52 on both MIT Cable and my very own cable back in Harrisburg. What channel is it on YOUR cable?

Sorry if you don't have cable. Or feet.

Last night I dreamed that Al Gore committed suicide by being burned alive by a dragon in Vietnam or some other Southeast Asian country (there were seven dragons in total; I think this one was the most powerful). I read about the suicide on his Wikipedia article and then saw video footage of it on CNN. I wonder what that means.

I wonder if it has to do with the fact that I've been taking 10.391: Sustainable Energy eight hours a day for the past two weeks?

My dorm, Burton-Conner, is the best. Even though we haven't meaningfully updated our web page in two and a half years, we're still the best. Why? Kitchen space. As Laura showed you, each floor is arranged into suites of 4-10 people each. This means that for a modest reduction in room size, every 6 people in the dorm get a full kitchen--sink, cabinets, two refrigerators, stove, and oven. No lugging a Target refrigerator from Omaha, NE in the back of your parents' minivan.

It also means that we have the highest per-capita average of fire alarms of any dorm on the MIT campus. Because just because you go to MIT doesn't mean you know that you should take the wrapper off of a microwave burrito, or that you shouldn't put pita chips in the oven and then forget about them. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing--I never would have met the former second-best Goldeneye player in the world if it weren't for a random fire alarm at Burton-Conner. (I WAS SO EXCITED)

Long long ago, I heard something, maybe on these blogs, about the culture of a dorm being somehow determined by its physical structure. I think Burton-Conner's culture is pretty much defined by fire alarms. Yeah, fire alarms and that's it. It's rare for any freshman to live in Burton-Conner for more than two weeks without hearing exactly how to prevent a catastrophe: "Close the door when you're cooking and open the windows. The suite alarm can go off for three minutes before the dorm alarm kicks in and everyone needs to evacuate. If something's on fire, cover it or throw it out the window!" Actually, it's rare for any freshman to live in Burton-Conner for two weeks without having a fire alarm go off. Just because it's 3 AM, or 12 degrees outside, or the night before the Boston Marathon, doesn't mean that someone knows how to cook a pepperoni 'n' cheese Hot Pocket. People usually take the minute before the fire department gets there to put on their finest attire and grab some playing cards or a snack. Then later w reminisce about how much fun we had playing hearts or secret card or whatever at a particular fire alarm, and how cold it was. I know 3 sets of people whose facebook friendship status is "They met randomly: Burton-Conner Fire Alarm!" I even wrote lyrics to the ringing alarm.

Basically, if Burton-Conner ever actually burns down, we're all pretty much doomed. But doomed awesomely.

And since it's better to show, not tell, I grabbed my camera last night. You might think it's stupid for me to just show 15 pictures of my ridiculously attractive friends standing outside a non-burning building, but let's see what kind of blog entries you come up with when someone wakes you up at 3 AM.

Oh no! A fire! You better ring the alarm!

Unfazed, Gabe '08 makes his traditional mug of hot cocoa for the road. The only two exceptions were the time that he set it off while insouciantly frying a hamburger and the time that he was in the middle of a boss battle in Zelda: Twilight Princess, so he locked the lounge door and hid under a couch so the firemen wouldn't reprimand him.

Well, I can do that too. I got a little worried that the fire department was going to find us there and yell at us (they have threatened to make everyone sleep outside after finding someone hiding under his covers hoping that the torturous noise would finally end), but Gabe assured me, "no, I do this EVERY TIME."

As you can see, Gabe does look pretty rowdy drinking his cocoa, doesn't he? It's a tradition.

Sung '10 has an adorable hat and is saying something, probably, "It's Lauren '10's birthday and there's a fire alarm!" Because everybody at MIT talks like that and says people's class year right after their name. We really do talk in numbers here. Richard '09 sympathizes.

When Ling '07 saw that I was taking pictures, I think she said something like, "You should take one of me because I'm not wearing any pants." Trust me. Or you could ask Evan '10 in the background. Anyway, I gave her some cocoa to thank her for this awesome pose.

Jeremy '09 brought his Mac outside so people could watch House. Everyone was entranced, except David '09 who apparently likes me better than Hugh Laurie.

Neither the late hour nor House nor the fact that it only snowed, like, one centimeter could stop Jeremy from throwing snowballs at his girlfriend Alice '09. Oh, kids.

"Sam, you have a camera?"
"Psh, Laura, I'm blogging this [stuff]."
"That's what it should say on the back of our blogger t-shirts."
"THIS IS THE REAL MIT!"

I don't think I really said that last thing, but in my head I did. In my head I'm also six foot one.

Then I just started taking some portraits, which turned out surprisingly decent considering it was 3 AM. E-mail me if you want any names or phone numbers!

Evan '10... he's wholesome!

Mason '10... he can moonwalk!

Richard '09... he's from Wisconsin!

MARK '09... the lowest grade he got all term was an 88%! And he builds killer robots!

I didn't really capture it well here, but there was actually a few puffs of smoke trickling out of the second-from-top floor window, which is much closer to an actual fire than most of our alarms are. It also meant that we had to stay outside for an extra 10 minutes while the air cleared.

But the end of the alarm has come often, and continues to often come. We headed back inside to beds or Wiis and decided that we would do this again sometime. Probably sooner than we want.

THIS IS THE REAL MIT!

Well, I sure enjoyed my month home in Harrisburg, although you wouldn't know it because I blogged only about things that happened at MIT. Sam's Mom and I are headed back for Boston tomorrow morning trying to avoid the deadly ice storm. After that I'll be taking 10.391: Sustainable Energy for the next two weeks. I'm too lazy to link to it right now, but it's a really intense course: 9 days, 9 hours a day, 9 units. I can't wait!

Stay tuned for tales of my audition for The Amazing Race, the world's largest indoor farm show taking place in my backyard, a special MIT guest in Harrisburg, an 800-pound butter sculpture, and, of course, Groker.

So Mitra asked me to blog an entry that she wrote in Zambia last night, and I realized that it's kind of bad when Mitra blogs more frequently than I do and she's in a third-world country. So I decided to finish up this entry, which I have been working on for over a month.

But this entry is dedicated to Laura and Ben Jones's Mom, both of whom are celebrating their birthdays today.

I think it was July or something when I found out that Ina Garten, the incomparable host of TV's Barefoot Contessa, was coming to the Crate & Barrel on Boylston Street to do a book signing in December. Since finding this out, I had been excited about said book signing basically every moment of every single day of my life, and spent every mile of my marathon training basically just dreaming about what I would say to her in person. Since MIT is actually RIGHT NEXT TO Boston, unlike a lot of other prominent colleges that purport to be near cities, this Crate and Barrel is about a 30-minute walk from my dorm.

For those of you who are not aware, Barefoot Contessa is this unbelievably charming cooking show on the Food Network. Basically, the premise is that in very episode, Ina is throwing some kind of a party in her huge house in the Hamptons for her brilliant husband Jeffrey and all of her flamboyant friends. But Ina doesn't want to be cooking while the party's going on, so she gives you helpful time-saving tips on how to prepare everything for the party well in advance and just toss it together when your guests get there. Sometimes she has to go get some flowers or something from her friends, so she hops into her BMW or her Mercedes and rides off to the flower store so she can have an awkward conversation with the Hamptons' number one florist, who is also her best friend. "Today I feel like the flying doctor of flowers," he once said. And all the while she's describing her cooking techniques and admonishing you for not using the "GOOD olive oil" or the "GOOD vanilla" but she's doing so in this deep, hypnotic, tremendously sexy voice, like melted butter on velvet, to the point where you really can't leave the room once you've started watching an episode. All glory to Ina Garten!

I found out sometime last year that my friend Dugan '08 was a huge fan of hers. I don't know how that's even possible, because he's a vegan and she uses heavy cream in basically every dish she makes (chocolate sorbet, roasted asparagus, fruit roll-ups... everything). Not only that, she's always so coy about adding the heavy cream. "And now," she says, "we're going to add two cups of heavy cream... because how bad could that be?" I think one time she might have made a vegan-friendly brussels sprouts dish or something. But really, who eats brussels sprouts?

I was even more surprised when I saw a Barefoot Contessa promotional bookmark hanging on the wall of Colin '10, since Colin '10 is like Sam's Mom in that he eats a total of like five different foods in the world. Usually when Sam's Mom is watching the show with me, she'll say something like, "Well that looked good, but then she had to go and put all that junk on it." And what Ina did was like bake a potato and then put chives on it. So I imagined that would have kind of been Colin '10's experience too. But anyway, when I told Dugan '08 and Colin '10 that Ina Garten was coming to Boston, they both just about exploded.

It was just about the perfect scene: the signing was on a Wednesday, so I only had a class from 11:00 to 11:30, and then from 3:30 to 5:30. The latter was with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Harbison, but I see him almost every day, so who cares? I think I told him that I had kidney stones or something. No, not really. Anyway, we decided to head over at 1:00 PM for the 4:00 PM signing, because Colin '10 had an 18.02: Multivariable Calculus recitation from 12:00 to 1:00 that he couldn't miss. Dizzle '09 made fun of us for leaving so early, telling us that she went to a Harry Potter book premiere 2 hours early and was the second person in line. Clearly, she didn't know exactly what level of celebrity we were dealing with here.

At 1:10 I called Colin '10 and woke him up, then abruptly informed him that Dugan '08 and I could not wait any longer and that we'd try to save him a place in line. Gloves on hands, Dugan '08 and I ran over to Crate and Barrel as fast as we possibly could. When we got there, we were greeted by a 5'4" armed sentry dressed in a Crate and Barrel apron.

"Are you here for Ina Garten?"
"Of course."
"Okay, well you have to buy one of these books. (I'll just stand here silently and make sure you do that.)"

Snap. The cookbooks cost $35 each, because they're about full-color pictures of Ina Garten's fabulous lifestyle as much as they are about her recipes. Dugan and I had discussed on the way over the prospect of just splitting one cookbook, just for the opportunity to meet Ina. However, standing there in front of the creepy Crate and Barrel woman and the stacks and stacks of cookbooks, we shot each other a few glances that basically said, "$35 is totally worth it for the two seconds Ina is going to spend thinking about my name." I even purchased an additional cookbook for my across-the-street neighbors Dot and Herk, who had once proudly showed me a copy of her earlier "Barefoot Contessa: Family Style" cookbook.

So, with three cookbooks in hands, we made our way upstairs, where we were directed into the rapidly-growing Ina Garten line. Contrary to Dizzle '09's assertion, Dugan '08 and I only secured ourselves spots number 17 and 18 in line. Since 17 is my lucky number, I was pretty darn excited--I knew that something good was about to happen. So we settled into line, Dugan with his detective novel about a chemistry professor and I with my digital camera and notepad, prepared to blog every aspect of this occasion, right down to the lady distributing complimentary Crate and Barrel water.

"Ha, are you just testing to make sure that your camera still works?"
"Oh, I just want to remember everything about this occasion (and I secretly love you, water lady.)"

But Dugan sure did like the water.

While waiting in line, Dugan and I got to sign up for a new Barefoot Contessa mailing list, from which I still have yet to receive an e-mail. But the lady setting it up sure seemed excited! Maybe we can invite her over to MIT and let her make roasted loin of pork with fennel in one of Burton-Conner's spacious kitchens. We also had several members of the Crate and Barrel gestapo go by to describe the signing procedure:

"Ina will only sign books for the first 200 customers in line. She will only sign books that you bought at Crate and Barrel, not ones that you brought from home. She will only sign books that have a sticky note in them. She will only sign on this page. She will not sign any special greetings. Ina will not pose for pictures, but you can take a picture of her while she's signing your book."

I thought it was funny that everything was phrased as if it were Ina Garten's decision and not just the set of rules Crate and Barrel established to sell the most cookbooks. Like you would get there with a copy of Barefoot Contessa Parties from home and Ina would say, "What the hell is this? Where's your Crate and Barrel receipt? Ina don't play that way. No more signings." And then she flips the signing table over and gives you the finger as she disappears back to her waiting BMW.

The line grew quickly, and by the time Colin '10 arrived, it was already 90 people long. Luckily, I was able to sneak downstairs with him just in time to try a sample from one of Ina's delicious baking mixes.

Yes, for only $9.00, plus eggs, GOOD butter, and heavy cream, you can make your own 8x8 sheet pan of Ina's Outrageous Brownies.

At around 3:55, we knew that Inageddon was approaching, so I started testing my camera.

I was THIS excited.

I tried to explain to Colin that I wasn't really taking his picture; I was just using his form to get an idea of the lighting conditions in Crate and Barrel, kind of like how Whistler's Mother is just an arrangement of rectangles and circles according to Whistler. But Colin ducked out of the shot anyway, and on the basis of the above picture I decided not to use flash to get a picture of Ina as she walked by.

THANKS, COLIN. No, seriously, my camera takes a while for the flash to go off, so I probably would have timed it wrong and gotten a perfectly-lit picture of Ina's posterior otherwise, so this is just as good. Anyway, Ina moves much, much, MUCH faster than you would expect watching her television show, when she always seems about one outrageous brownie away from passing out in her bœuf bourguignon, if you know what I mean.

Luckily, we had many more opportunities to take pictures of Ina, even if many of them were purposefully blocked by Crate and Barrel staff and her friend Barbara.

Even today, over a month later, I'm still a little shell-shocked by my twenty-second conversation with Ina. I must have blacked out, because there are definitely pieces of the conversation that I don't remember, despite people telling me specific things that I said to her. But piecing together my own recollection with that of Colin and Dugan, I think it went something like this:

"OH INA, your butternut squash and apple soup recipe is the best recipe EVER."
"The best recipe ever? In the world? (Oh Barbara, look at this silly little man.)"
"I MEAN, everyone I... I made it... they tell me that, and I won fifty dollars!"
"Well, it's one of my favorites too. Oh, do you have another book to sign?"
"YES! OH YES! It's for my neighbors. My across-the-street neighbors. I DON'T KNOW if they have it already, but I'm sure that they'll like this one better, you know, because you signed it."
"Well, that sounds to me like it's a (let me raise my eyebrows suggestively) good neighbor policy. Bye, now. Thanks for coming."
"Okay, bye! (thank you so much, I will treasure this for the rest of my life)."

I think that INA GARTEN FLIRTED WITH ME! Unfortunately, that was probably the closest I will ever get to greatness.

But fortunately, the story of Ina Garten flirting with me is not even the best story of this fine evening. Now, the way that the signing works is that a helpful Crate and Barrel employee comes by and gives you a sticky note. You write your name on it, and then you put it on the title page of the work, because Ina Garten doesn't really care what your name is. Now, it just so happens that Dugan '08 has a friend who is nicknamed "Bucket," but she was too busy in class to come get her book signed. So Dugan got the book signed to himself and Bucket '08 and gave it to her as a present.

The best part is when Ina signed it, she just asked, "So that's DOUG-an? D-U-G-A-N?" And even though his name is pronounced "DOOG-an," Dugan just said, "Yes, ma'am!" Now, you'd think that Ina Garten would be fazed by being asked to sign a book to Bucket, but...

...it almost made me feel bad for getting one of my books signed to just me. I should have gotten it signed "to Sam and Quasar." Then I would just need to find someone else who liked Ina Garten. And I would be like, "Here you go. Happy Birthday. Your new nickname is... Quasar."

I think that's everything. WOW MY LIFE ROCKS.

So, although he may not have actually scored 20,000 women, Wilt did score 100 points in a single basketball game. He did so in Hersheypark Arena, a twenty-minute drive from my house.

The only thing I scored this semester was the music for "All In Green Went My Love Riding," my final project for 21M.303: Writing in Tonal Forms 1. The class is traditionally taught around two major projects: a minuet in the Baroque style and an art song in the traditional style of lieder. This semester Dr. Elena Ruehr, who has the greatest Michigan accent of all time, chose to teach the class such that every Wednesday, we'd bring in our compositions and get to work on them in small groups. It was really helpful and made me feel like she was really hearing and caring about my music as I was writing it.

After my baroque string quartet ended up sounding a little bit like a cross between Schubert and Debussy, I was really excited when Dr. Ruehr, who composes contemporary music herself, said, "Okay, so, for the songs, you can do anything you want. Make it atonal, modern, spoken word, whatever." I think she didn't really know what she was getting into when she said that. Since the other three people in my small group were all composing basically normal art songs, I thought that mine would be the weirdest one in the class. I was in for quite a surprise when I showed up on performance day and heard a slow transcendental meditation in 5/4 about a dead starfish on a beach and a septuplet-filled "paranoid" take on Robert Frost's House-Fear that switched into falsetto every three notes or so.

But mine was still pretty weird. Look and listen for yourself (that way I can claim to have an audience of tens of people).

the score
the music

Perform it at your own senior recital! But tell me first so that I can rewrite the piano part, for I fear there are a few sections that are impossible, or at least needlessly complicated. I got a lot of praise from the singer for writing a reasonable vocal part, which makes sense since I'm a singer myself. However, I'm an atrocious pianist, so I just assume that anything I can play on piano at half-tempo will be no problem for an accomplished pianist. I think my rule faltered in at least a few places writing this part.

Seriously though, just having the opportunity to write something like that and get individual feedback from a real live composer was amazing. While some students were less than thrilled about the more free-form, less theory-based nature of the class...

DR. RUEHR: "I wonder why none of the other professors who have taught this class have allowed you to write atonal music?"
DISGRUNTLED STUDENT: "You know that it's called writing in TONAL forms, right?"

...faculty-student interaction is so great at MIT that you can be this sassy with all of your professors!

I think that's it for today, Parappa.

I was just about to get some sleep last night--I had to wake up for a 1 PM lunch with some of my marching bandmates from high school, which required considerable effort--when I heard Sam's Mom crying from the living room. "SAM!" she yelled. "The Cornucopia of Doom is on!" Okay, well that's only my favorite episode of Star Trek EVER, next to the one where Spock says "Logic is a little bird, chirping in a meadow." So I thought I'd start yet another blog entry while watching Commodore Decker fail to save the universe with his well-intentioned but ultimately meaningless sacrifice.

Anyway, Sam's Mom just figured out how her brand-new DVR system works (unlike JKim's household, not all electronic tasks are left to MIT students here in rainy Harrisburg, PA), so I'm going to hold off on doomsday until tomorrow.

Another class that almost killed me in the past week was 21M.500: Senior Seminar in Music, which, as devoted fans of my blog (are there any left?) probably know, is taught by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Harbison. I remember one time, a book was recommended to me on the basis that "It won the PULITZER PRIZE." I really hope that I am in that situation again so I can be like, "Oh yeah? I took a small seminar class taught by a Pulitzer Prize-winner. I got a B+."

Wow, I'm a jerk.

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Harbison is not a jerk though. He's seriously a genius. Long long ago, in one of my favorite MITblogs entries of all time, Mitra writes about

The outdoor terrace, where mes amis mingled until our feast was ready. We played this "game" in which non-MIT people would yell out a number, and MIT people would say to which course it corresponded. Fun for toute la famille!

I think that you could play the same game with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Harbison and Bach cantatas. You call out a number from 1 to 220 or whatever, and he tells you the name of the cantata, the year it was written, the Sunday on which it was to be performed, the English translation of the German text, outlines all of the movements for you, and sings the chorale melody on which the entire cantata is based. I seriously have never met anybody who knows so much about music, and is yet so unpretentious about it and able to communicate it so well to sleepy engineering undergrads burnt out on problem sets and grad school applications.

(I will finish grad school applications as soon as I beat Startropics on Nestopia! I'm already at Zoda, okay?)

The class was all about late Bach, when he abandoned all pretense of working for commissions and decided to start writing the weirdest, most groundbreaking counterpoint of all time. We spent about half the semester just studying his Musical Offering to Frederick the Great (by the way, I love German adjective rules more than most people), in which he wrote quite possibly the world's first 6-part fugue, transcribed a two-week old improvisation from memory, and wrote ten canons based on a theme that Schoenberg judged to be nearly impossible for canon-writing. Schoenberg was kind of stupid, but I really like Pierrot Lunaire. Anyway, as a result of this class, I now know more about Bach's ancestry and personal finances than I do about inorganic chemistry. But guess which class is on my resume!

After that, we did some work on the cantatas and gave presentations on the nature of improvisation. Mine was about Ives's Concord Sonata, and as I chronicled in this entry, it made Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Harbison laugh. Intentionally! Or maybe he was just laughing at Ives's weird dissonances. Seriously, there's this one recording of Ives "improvising" at the piano, in which he just plays random notes for a whole minute, and then ends on a high Ab, and then he's like, "OOPS! My finger slipped!" and he hits a high G instead. It's fantastic.

Our last project was to take pieces from Bach's organ mass and arrange them for small ensembles of our choosing. I had originally been talked into arranging my prelude, which was essentially in four voices and only used the manuals of the organ, for violin, viola, soprano voice, and baritone saxophone. Hey, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer wouldn't steer me wrong, would he? Realizing the night before the project was due that I sucked at writing for strings, I took a closer look at the piece and found that each of the four parts was set almost exactly in one of the ranges generally associated with human voices. So, mustering up every bit of my courage, I defied Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Harbison and produced...

THIS

It totally deserves its own line. Why? Because Pulitzer-prize winning composer John Harbison called it "ingenious and appropriate ... a worthy addition to the motet repertoire." I was ecstatic, but I then faced the challenge of rustling up three other singers with whom I could perform it five days later. Of course, I rocked that too, and we gave an excellent peformance marred only by my own numerous singing mistakes (you would think that I would make the fewest pitch errors, having written the song for twelve hours, but no).

In the end, it still wasn't enough to earn me my favorite grade in the class: an A-. Since MIT doesn't count plusses or minuses in calculating your GPA, getting an A- is pretty much the best thing in the world. Well, besides chocolate fountains. I was a little disappointed about my B+ at first, but then I remembered: at least I'm not a triple amputee. I should be thankful for that.

I should also be thankful for the fact that I GO TO MIT AND BRILLIANT DOWN-TO-EARTH PULITZER PRIZE WINNERS TEACH MY CLASSES.

Okay guys, you did get me on the whole immaculate conception business. Although I guess my sentence could still be technically correct--a komodo dragon could have an immaculate conception, assuming that it had a creator of an appropriate dispostion--the article was indeed about parthenogenesis.

Anyhoo, the last time I posted, like, a gazillion years ago, I mentioned that I was working on a project for ICE-T that involved the possibility of incorporating a formic acid fuel cell into a handheld cell phone. After three years of p-sets (which, by the end of last year, I was beginning to punt in spectacular fashion), it was really refreshing to get a class where the only instructions were, "Okay, read this paper, come up with a problem, and solve it yourself. We'll be here if you need us!" It was less refreshing to do all this in one month, but so it goes.

Here's what I wrote last time:

We're designing (not building--the designing part is hard enough), a fuel cell that could theoretically be used to power a cell phone. A cell phone of the future. We're not actually using hydrogen, because that could explode and kill you while you're talking to your grandmother about apple pie recipes, and that would be fun for nobody. Instead we're using 22 M formic acid, which is, needless to say, MUCH safer. Just don't, you know, break your cell phone open or anything like that. Anyway, the formic acid is pressurized, so it goes through a reactor that's about 3 cm x 3 cm while air (80% nitrogen, 20% oxygen) flows in countercurrent. Redox occurs, there's a microfabricated nanoporous silicon membrane, and BAMF! Cell phone power!

My friend Jacqueline and I are doing all this: all the design parameters and cost estimations, all the pressures and temperatures and safety calculations, and writing a 10-page paper and a powerpoint presentation on the subject, in four weeks. Integrated Chemical Engineering, or "ICE," the senior capstone subject in Chemical Engineering, consists of two modules: one lasting eight crazy weeks, and one lasting four far crazier weeks, during which you take all the theoretical nonsense that you've spent the past four years learning and apply it to two different chemical engineering problems. This is so you can prove that you actually know how to do chemical engineering before you go off to work at your six-figure investment banking job and stop caring about fluid mechanics.

You crazy kids asked a lot of questions that basically amounted to, "But wait. Wouldn't you die?"

NO, Chester.

The first step in the project was to establish a set of constraints such that a user of the phone would NOT die, which is probably something that real engineers in industry look at, too. We decided that the pressure in the fuel cartridge could not be above 10 atmospheres, the design had to completely isolate the 22 M formic acid from the user, and that the temperature of the cell phone could not be above 40 C. This would prevent death by shrapnel, acid burn, or setting your hair on fire. Our final design had an operating temperature of 38 C. I was kind of happy about the prospect of not killing people with my cell phone, but some smart-alecky student pointed out after my oral presentation that this is actually above body temperature. You can't fool all of the people all of the time!

Why don't you stop being so picky and help save the world, Andrew?

Based on these constraints, we designed a fuel cell that would fit in a cell phone and seemed like it would work pretty well. You fuel it by buying 2 x 2 in cartridges that you stick in and replace as necessary. There's no need to worry about toxic waste, because the products of the redox reaction in a fuel cell are carbon dioxide and water. In fact, it would actually be less wasteful than batteries because you don't just throw the cartridges out when you're done--they're designed to be refillable! Since Wal-Mart is a major player in my hydrogen economy of the future, there would be formic acid kiosks in every Super Wal-Mart (between the McDonalds and the one-hour photo) where you could take your spent cartridges to have the waste water drained and the formic acid refilled.

We wanted to make sure that our hypothetical cell phone fuel cell would be a top-of-the-line model, so we e-mailed Professor Rich Masel of UIUC, who was listed by Wikipedia as the world's foremost expert on formic acid fuel cells, to ask for the highest power density he had observed. Rich responded:

The performance has improved since these papers were written, but the results were done at my company and never published.

Looks like somebody felt a little threatened by our design!

In the end, we found that you could indeed operate a cell phone using a formic acid! But we discovered that the energy content of formic acid in a 2 x 2 inch cartridge would be enough power a cell phone for about one day, if you're lucky. Then you'd have to take a new cartridge out of your pocket, or purse, or man-purse, or whatever, and slip it into your phone. Besides the fact that you'd be carrying around a couple cartridges of 22 M formic acid at all times, that's going to add up to a lot of cartridges pretty quickly. And a lot of trips to Super Wal-Mart.

Also, any time you're not actively talking on the phone, it's going to heat up to 80 C (178 F), which will burn a hole in your pants. But that's more of a problem for marketing than it is for us.

So, our final conclusion was that using formic acid fuel cells as a sustainable energy solution in portable electronic devices such as cell phones is just something that depressed grad students and cynical professors say to get funding for their research, because all you have to do is say the world "sustainable" nowadays and people will just shower you with money and firstborn children.

We are so smart!

So I was just sitting here this evening (don't you mean "this morning?") watching a biblical archaeology special on The History Channel that was trying to determine the precise location of Sodom and Gomorrah when I decided to check my grades, like I do, you know, every 20 minutes. Because there might still be someone in the Student Services Office working really hard to get those grades in right now! Anyway, when I logged into WebSIS, I took special notice of a link that had been there for the past three years:

"Hmm." thought I. "I guess that's me." I noticed that it had to be in by February 9 or I would suffer a $40 fine, so I figured there'd be no harm in doing it tonight. A few moments later, I had produced this image, a "diploma mock-up -- for illustrative purposes only:"

Three and a half years, 17 GIR's, 8 PE points, 50 sleepless nights, and 10,000 miles paid for by MISTI. Now all that's standing between me and an MIT diploma is ICE 2.

I remember lounging around my suite with a roommate named David and a sophomore named Katy about this time my Freshman year. "Wow guys," said Katy, "You're one-eighth of the way done with MIT. How does that feel." Now, in my mind I know that it was a long time ago because Katy moved in with her boyfriend two months later and we never saw her again (shame, because I think that to this day I owe her a raw chicken breast). But my heart, Anita, but my heart, FEELS like it was just yesterday. And now I've got one-eighth of the way left.

Man I'm old.

SUPER SORRY about the lack of blogging for the past month. I promise to write retroactive entries on everything that kept me too occupied to blog, including using 22 M formic acid to fuel you cell phone, a song written on an e e cummings poem, being called "ingenious" by a Pulitzer Prize-winner, going to Blue Man Group, and flirting with Ina Garten.

OH WOW, it's been a while. I'm real sorry; I'm just not exactly on top of my life right now, as the remainder of this entry should prove.

So I stayed up until 5 AM last night working on my ICE-T ("ice tea") problem set. To answer James Eastwood's question: YES! We're designing (not building--the designing part is hard enough), a fuel cell that could theoretically be used to power a cell phone. A cell phone of the future. We're not actually using hydrogen, because that could explode and kill you while you're talking to your grandmother about apple pie recipes, and that would be fun for nobody. Instead we're using 22 M formic acid, which is, needless to say, MUCH safer. Just don't, you know, break your cell phone open or anything like that. Anyway, the formic acid is pressurized, so it goes through a reactor that's about 3 cm x 3 cm while air (80% nitrogen, 20% oxygen) flows in countercurrent. Redox occurs, there's a microfabricated nanoporous silicon membrane, and BAMF! Cell phone power!

My friend Jacqueline and I are doing all this: all the design parameters and cost estimations, all the pressures and temperatures and safety calculations, and writing a 10-page paper and a powerpoint presentation on the subject, in four weeks. Integrated Chemical Engineering, or "ICE," the senior capstone subject in Chemical Engineering, consists of two modules: one lasting eight crazy weeks, and one lasting four far crazier weeks, during which you take all the theoretical nonsense that you've spent the past four years learning and apply it to two different chemical engineering problems. This is so you can prove that you actually know how to do chemical engineering before you go off to work at your six-figure investment banking job and stop caring about fluid mechanics.

Sorry, it's the time of the season for offers, and all of us poor chemical engineers planning to go to grad school and save the world are getting just a little bit jaded.

WOW, that was a mouthful. Anyway, I fell asleep at 5 AM last night because I was working on that, among other things, and I haven't yet learned to efficiently budget my time. One thing that I regret about MIT is that I almost never, and I say never, think in bed anymore. During high school, after a hard day of work it was no trouble for me to just lie down, put a sheet over my face, and listen to some Brian Eno while contemplating the meaning of existence or what I was having for lunch the next day or what I would sing when I auditioned for American Idol or whatever. But now? No. I can't put my head on a pillow for more than about 27 seconds before I completely pass out into an incomprehensibly deep sleep, waking up only occasionally to babble incoherently and to hilarious effect. It's a useful skill, because sometimes I want to sleep for only, say, 7 minutes before my clothes come out of the dryer, and being able to fall asleep so quickly will net me 6 whole minutes of sleep passed out on the floor in my clothes. In a fetal position.

So for me, dreaming is just about the most awesome thing in the world, because it's kind of like thinking and sleep put together, and I usually only dream when I've been sleeping for a really long time. Which is also just about the best thing in the world, now that I think of it. So whenever I end up having an interesting dream, I do one of two things: I either a) tell you about it, or b) tell Mitra about it.

I started with b) this morning, but after some further thought on the subject I decided to go with a) also.

From: Sam Maurer
To: Mitra Lhrnbq!xobile
Time: 12:48 PM
Subject: long story

I had a dream that I went out in the middle of the night to the basement of Building 4 to get some chinese food, but they didn't have any pork, and what I wanted from this particular restaurant was a pork dish (I think it was based on this real-life time that Shana and I went to Philadelphia and randomly walked around Chinatown until we got hungry and we found this random noodle place and they had hand-cut noodles, which I got with ground pork and scallions and it was one of the best things I ever ate and also cost only $3.75). I met up there with some people who I randomly knew in real life, but I forget who they were. Anyway, so I ordered chicken fried rice, which cost only $4 but what they gave me was like this Italian-inspired dish that was kind of rancid-tasting cool whip/mozzarella cheese with red and green sauce poured on (get it, red white and green?). It was horrible and I couldn't eat it, but other people were getting similar dishes and loving them (they would pour different colored sauces on the cool whip depending on which country you asked for). I was like, no, this isn't what I asked for, but it's okay, I'm not really hungry anymore, and they let me go without paying for it. They were closing so I didn't want to trouble them to make new chicken fried rice.

so then I thought I saw Woon Teck with bleached blonde hair at the next table, and I just started yelling, "WOON TECK! WOON TECK!" But he didn't look over. So I went and got a slightly closer look and it turned out that it was not Woon Teck, just some guy who was Asian and skinny (yfr). But then the REAL Woon Teck with bleached blonde hair, wearing a pink shirt and makeup, was above us in Killian Court and popped his head through the window and said like one word (I forget what it was, but probably something like "Sam Maurer!" or "MEOW!") and I was like, "Oh, Woon Teck!"

then I woke up to find that I had slept through my second step aerobics class. ARGH, how am I going to make this up??

(phys ed classes are graded on attendance only, but you can only miss one per quarter--I've been waking up at 7 AM twice a week for my one-hour step aerobics class, which is the only, and I mean THE ONLY thing standing in the way of my impending graduation, and now I have missed two classes with one week to go in the semester)

So when I got to thinking about this dream, I got to thinking about Woon Teck. And Woon Teck, oh, Woon Teck... he really has come to symbolize what I love about MIT. Because Woon Teck's weird. But just saying that about an MIT student tells you nothing. Because basically everyone at MIT is weird. But in a different way. I never thought that the spectrum of weird was quite so wide or contained quite so many distinct colors. You could be weird like a pre-med who lives in McCormick, or weird like a TEP brother and build giant trebuchets, or weird like someone who lives in Random Hall takes ten classes, or weird like someone who lives in Burton-Conner and showers twice a day and bleaches his pots and pans, or maybe you stalk people compulsively and read the random documents in their public directories, or you just walk around quoting the Natalie Portman rap video at inappropriate moments. In any case, you're FREAKING CREEPING ME OUT.

So when I say, "Woon Teck is weird," did you imagine that Woon Teck was a 98-pound Singaporean who graduated MIT with a master's degree in four years, decorated our suite with Hello Kitty and yet played on the MIT Rugby team (only to spite his ex-boyfriend), cross-registered at Harvard to learn Swedish (with the sole intention of using it find a Scandinavian lumberjack lover), applied nightly facial masks (and yet only consumed protein shakes and food fried in a single pot of oil), and had seven middle names. And meowed at me. In casual conversation. I mean, did you even consider that picture to be in the realm of possibilities?

If not, it's probably because you don't go to MIT.

I think in the end, I will remember more Woon Teck than fluid mechanics.

Well, it's been a while. According to MT I started writing this entry one week ago today.

A lot has been up. I designed a microfabricated fuel cell that could be used to power a cell phone. We filled Ruth's room with one thousand inflated balloons. My flight back to Harrisburg was delayed for three hours. Sam's Mom has a broken refrigerator. My hard drive crashed. I'm a Mac user now. I need to find a way to acquire some score-writing software within the next three days. I took TBP members to Casino Royale (awesome!) and Body Worlds 2 (barf!). I dropped 6.003. I ate a lot of stuffing today.

But most importantly, like two weeks ago Justin Kim wrote:

I did this program for a class I'm taking called Non-linear dynamics which deals a lot with chaos/fractal patterns and showing them through code - vb + java. Are there similar programs at MIT that one could take?

Well Justin, looking at the course catalog (updated for fall 2007! pfffft!), we offer at least math 10 classes in nonlinear dynamics, not counting other ones that might be in other courses (fluid mechanics or string theory, for example). Two of these classes, 18.353J Nonlinear Dynamics: Chaos and 18.354J Nonlinear Dynamics: Continuum Systems even have the words "Nonlinear Dynamics" in the title! These are undergrad classes and you'll most likely have the prereqs for them by your first term sophomore year. A lot of the other nonlinear dynamics courses are grad classes, but it's perfectly fine for undergrads to take grad classes. Hey, Mollie did it! In fact, the line between grad and undergrad classes is particularly blurred in the math department, where you often don't need tons of background and experience to take a class. As long as you can hang with the problem sets, you're alright.

I feel 12% better about myself having answered that question. So more updates about my life in general and MIT life in general a bit later this long, wonderful weekend.

I wish I could more be like Blake Ross.

I got this info from Sergeant Pepperz on a Boston Duck Tour I went on this afternoon with Tau Beta Pi. Duck Tours are something you might do with your parents or grandparents, but they're a little too touristy for a future Boston resident to pay $26 for a ride--after all, you can just get upperclassmen to to tell you all these helpful little facts. Luckily, TBP has awesome social chairs that plan events like these at huge subsidies.

One thing that I really appreciate about MIT is that Boston is RIGHT THERE. Like, RIGHT THERE. Like, right out my window. For two-thirds of you, it's just going to be a half-mile walk out of your room and across the Harvard Bridge. The other third of you are actually going to live in Boston! When other colleges say that they have a city life, it might be a half-hour shuttle ride or a 2-hour bus ride or a 6-hour plane ride to the nearest city! And yet, you still have the river separating your classes from Boston--it's not like NYU where the bottom floor of your dorm might be a Chinese supermarket or something.

BUT WAIT, there's more. If you walk fifteen minutes out of your dorm and take the T down to South Station, you can get on a Chinatown bus down to New York City! It's about a four hour ride and it costs $32.50. So last weekend my fierce non-girlfriend Mitra and I decided to head down for about 24 hours of total domination.

In the past, when I've gone to New York, I've been all "Oh WOW I want to get student rush tickets to a Broadway show and see all the great museums and go to these 57 great restaurants that I saw on Food Network and get mugged and do everything!" But since I am now twenty years old and mature, the whole point of this trip was more, "Oh, I just want to have a nice relaxing weekend far far away from MIT and Boston." Having completed our final project for ICE 15 minutes before the deadline, I was indeed a little bit ready for a break from all that.

So, since every single person who read my election day entry voted, here are a few pictures and anecdotes of last weekend.

We started off our time in New York with a trip to Pommes Frites, where we got three sauces--vietnamese pineapple mayo, pesto mayo, and sweet chili paste. You might think these sound weird, but the person after us ordered "a sauce made of 3/4 curry mayonnaise and 1/4 sambal olek." Seriously, what is wrong with you? Anyway, we were in a huge gigantic hurry to get to the apartment of Mitra's friend Veena, so we decided to eat while we were on the subway. At 2 PM in New York. The result was a Lucy and Ethel-worthy scene in which we dropped sweet chili paste on the ground, offered free french fries to other tourists after almost dumping mayonnaise on them, and speed-munching fries at opportune subway stops.

On our way to Veena's apartment, we were hungry something fierce, so we almost stopped to get something to eat...

...or perhaps someone to eat. But no, we pressed on. Besides, a vegetarian on pita would not provide nearly as much food porn as Rosa, where we eventually did end up going with Veena.

We had a lot of choices as to where we could go to eat, but Veena basically summarized them thusly: "Well, we could go to this noodle place that I don't like very much, or we could go to Rosa, where they have homemade guacamole that changed my life." At least, that's what I heard, basically. So, of course, we had to end up being huge gigantic tourists and take pictures of that action.

But how was the food? Intriguing, if you're my non-girlfriend Mitra.

Before dinner, Mitra, the best saleswoman on Earth, and I helped Veena find a delightful new coat worthy of Kara Saun from Banana Republic. After dinner, we went back to a post-Halloween party at Veena's apartment, where we reprised our Simon and Paula costumes. It was great, although Veena had seven OutKast songs on her iPod, Bombs Over Baghdad was NOT one of them. Mitra and I were so distressed by that, we had to sneak out for two hours in the middle of the party.

We concluded our stay by heading down to Central Park for a few minutes to learn about the salvation of our souls from helpful pamphlets and also to watch the conclusion of the New York Marathon. I have to tell you, I was getting a little tired of running around all the time last week--I only ran a total of 8 miles the whole week! But watching hundreds of nearly-dead people crossing the finish line and hundreds more yelling madly for them and throwing babies at them made me think fondly of last April and being carried 26.2 miles on the enthusiasm of tens of thousands of crazy Bostonians. Basically you can get me to do anything if you tell me that people will be cheering for me.

All things considered, last weekend was refreshing, like a green tea frappucino.

I got to see Mandelbrot speak on Thursday! It was for like 30 seconds, for a variety of reasons, but it was cool just to be in the same room for a minute and catch a glimpse of his well-preserved 82-year-old form. Especially because I really thought he was dead. But no! He's not dead! He's still alive and quipping things like, "So I said 'when you look at dirt, realize that it's not really dirt.'" That's about all I remember. Battle on, Mandelbrot.

My friend and labmate Steph '07 spoke at the Class of 2010 choice of major fair on Monday. I wanted to go myself to reveal the wonders of Chemical Engineering to excited freshmen and score lots of free food, but I had a class taught by Pulitzer Prize-Winning Composer John Harbison to attend. Oh well.

Anyway, according to Steph, the most frequently asked question, besides "Turkeys into oil?! Do you know Sam Maurer? I read his blog!" was something along the lines of "What is the difference between Chemistry and Chemical Engineering?"

It's funny, because I remember going to a choice of major fair in April 2004 and asking that very same question myself, and not really listening to the answer, like, at all. And I ended up kind of majoring in both of them until last fall, when I decided that I'd probably rather be eaten by thermodynamics than quantum chemistry. So I pretty much know what's going on with both of these majors. For the edification of frosh and prefrosh alike, the correct answer to that question is...

"There is actually nothing similar about those two majors. At all."

So if you're a chemistry major (Course 5), you're going to learn about molecules. What they look like, how they react with each other, what their orbitals are doing at the quantum level, whether they'll kill you or not and WHY WHY WHY WHY they have these properties. You'll spend three semesters in organic chemistry, one or two each in inorganic, biological, and quantum chemistry, and one in kinetics. Because of the way the courses are structured (no conflicting times and few prerequisites), it's actually not too difficult to squeeze the whole major into three years, leaving you free your senior year to work on a double major, pursue other interests, or, if you're like most chemistry majors I know, TAKE EVEN MORE CHEMISTRY CLASSES!

If you're a chemical engineer (Course 10), you don't care about molecules. At all. No, really. What you're going to do is take some reaction or some process that a chemist has given you already, look at it, and say "Hmm, HOW HOW HOW HOW can I make this bigger/smaller/faster/better?". You still have to take a few chemistry classes--kinetics, organic chemistry, an introductory lab, and for some strange reason biochem--but you're not really going to use any of those in your engineering courses. These courses--thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, heat transfer, and chemical kinetics--are the heart and soul of chemical engineering. They treat compounds and reaction not so much as things to be studied for they work, but rather as elements of a problem that have specific properties for you to minimize and maximize depending on what your professor asked you to do.

Either way, you're going to have to take three lab courses that will make you cry. But if you're Chem it's going to be because your molybdenum tris-anilide compounds aren't splitting molecular dinitrogen, and if you're Chem E it's because your professor wants you to take all your data and make 50 more spreadsheets out of it with 100 more charts before your group meeting on Tuesday.

If you're ever torn between these two majors, as I was earlier in my MIT career, my recommendation would be to get a UROP or two and see what you're more interested in--the WHY of chemistry or the HOW of chemical engineering. That's actually my recommendation for most problems at MIT. "I don't know what to do with my life." "Get a UROP!" "I need some money." "Get a UROP!" "My boyfriend is cheating on me." "Get a UROP!" "It hurts when I pee." "Get a UROP!" But in this case, it might actually help you. I had a really, outstandingly bad summer UROP in chemistry that ended up with my arm in a splint and a professor not speaking to me anymore. Two months later I had a UROP in chemical engineering that involved saving the world by turning turkeys into usable fuel. The rest is history.

I am also really sad that Jack Palance died, because I used to watch reruns of the 1980's Ripley's Believe It Or Not all the time when I was a kid.

Thanks to Shilpa for telling me that dubious bit of information that she found in a women's fitness magazine at the Z-Center while working out.

So if you've been listening for these past few blog entries, you know that I have 6.003: Signals and Systems on Junior/Senior P/D/F, a well-known but surprisingly little-used option that you can exercise twice during your last two years at MIT. I also have a 6.003 p-set due tomorrow, but that seems less important than blogging right now. I might just print out a copy of this entry and submit that.

So in 6.003 there are three kinds of classes that I'm supposed to go to per week.

In lectures, a tenured and world-renowned professor will stand up in front of the class and give a 50-minute presentation with overheads. He doesn't usually stop for questions, but a couple times students have stopped to ask him questions and he's been glad to oblige. He's not at all stuffy, though. One time to introduce the concept of the Fourier Transform, he gave a 10-minute talk on the life and times of Optimus Prime. Because just like Optimus Prime can be a truck or a robot depending on what he needs to do, a function can be in the frequency or time domains depending on what you need to do. I have lecture twice a week.

In recitations, a non-tenured faculty member or lecturer gets up in front of a group of about 15-20 of us and works through practice problems on the board. She often stops and asks for input from the students on questions so we get in the habit of solving problems ourselves. Sometimes she assigns small group exercises that we then talk about as a class. She encourages questions and always stops to answer them at length, and if she doesn't have time for a particular question in class she'll send an e-mail out to all her students with the answer, or cover it in the next recitation. I really like her. I have recitation twice a week.

In tutorials, a computer science grad student hands us a worksheet with a bunch of problems on it. There's anywhere between three to eight of us there at a time. We then work on those problems individually and he walks around and gives us specific help as we go. Sometimes the kids who are taking the class on P/D/F are kind of lazy and don't work very hard, but he's always willing to give us extra help and spend as long with people as they need. I have tutorial once per week.

All of these individuals--professor, recitation instructor, and TA--have weekly office hours, too, in case you need extra help on a problem set or have a specific question, and you're particularly motivated and want to go talk to them yourself.

But I'm not particularly motivated in 6.003. That might be a problem. I've completely punted two of the p-sets so far. Out of six. Hey, I had better stuff to do. And I got a B+ on the test, so I'm not too worried about it. Yet. I think every MIT student really appreciates the fact that drop date doesn't occur until about the 11th week of term.

My real problem is that I've been skipping basically all of the tutorials. The first week I forgot to look up what room it was in, so I just didn't go instead of facing the shame of walking in late. Then I went for two of them and met my really friendly and only slightly awkward TA, Matt. And then I didn't go to the next one. I think I had something actually important to do. Then the next time I was really hosed from an ICE pset and I fell asleep in the library and woke up 10 minutes into tutorial. And I was just like, "ennh" and I went back to sleep. So then I decided that I was too ashamed to ever see my very nice, slightly awkward TA again. One time he even e-mailed me to ask if I was going to turn in my one p-set and I was like, "Uh, no, it's on P/D/F, but thanks for your concern!" and he was like, "Okay, but work on the problems because there's a test next week! Thanks for letting me know! *nice, slightly awkward smiley face*"

So today he was walking into lecture (conveniently, we have tutorial right before lecture) and I went a different way to avoid him, because I go to MIT and if there's one thing three years of MIT have taught me, it's that you can often hide from people when you don't have adequate social skills to downplay an awkward situation. Right. But then I was shocked--SHOCKED! when he came over to me specifically and said "Oh, SAM, here's your p-set back! I just thought I'd give them all out while we're all here in class." This was one of the four that I actually did, of course. Then he laughed his nice, slightly awkward laugh and crept away.

I felt really bad and I was decided to write a blog entry tribute to him--that's when I thought of this awesome entry title--but then I looked over five minutes later and noticed that he was already asleep, 5 minutes into lecture! Even I can usually do better than that. I kept glancing over for the entire lecture and, yep. He slept through the whole thing.

So, nice, slightly awkward TA, I'll cut you a deal. I won't tell the professor that you slept through his entire brilliant lecture today, and you can give me a B on this week's homework assignment. Okay?

I wish I were as cool as Mitra.

Thanks to Zach for that random fact at the suggestion of a "barbarian wedding."

There's going to be a great entry about all the fun Mitra and I had in New York last weekend, but I'm not going to write it until tomorrow. And you don't get to read it unless you vote. Now, I did my part by voting against Rick Santorum on a beautiful sunny Wednesday last week in Killian Court, but since then all my Google News feeds seem to be telling me stories about getting out the vote at the grass-roots level, I'm going to do my part here too.

So if even ONE registered voter currently residing in their US voting district reads this entry and then doesn't vote today, I'm not going to post anything about New York. So don't ruin it for everyone else, okay?

Trust me, I'll know!

Confused thanks to Ariel '09 for sending me a text message at 2 AM with only that fact.

There exists an old joke about various scientific professions that goes like this:

"An astronomer, a physicist, and a mathematician were on vacation in Scotland. From a train window, they saw a black sheep in the middle of a field. "How interesting", observed the astronomer, "all Scottish sheep are black." To which the physicist replied "No, no! Some Scottish sheep are black!" The mathematician gazed heavenward, then intoned, "In Scotland, there exists at least one field, containing at least one sheep, at least one side of which is black."

So today I came home and started a conversation with Mitra. "Blah blee blah blee blah." I said. "La la la la I'm going to read Interpreter of Maladies and then The Unbearable Lightness of Being." said she. "OH SNAP!" I cried. "I HAVE THAT BOOK OUT FROM THE LIBRARY RIGHT NOW!"

So what can we learn from this experience?

1. There exists at least one library at MIT.
2. There exist at least two books that are elements of this library system.
3. At least two of the books contained in this library are The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera.
4. There exist at least two students at MIT who are not only literate, but also check out works of fiction from libraries.
5. The probability that two bloggers who live next to each other would randomly check out The Unbearable Lightness of Being within four weeks of each other is nonzero.
6. Given the above hypotheses, the probability that two such bloggers would take a stupid picture involving these two library books is 1.

Seriously! People at MIT read books! QED.