New Camera!

As an incentive to take pictures to show you all, the admissions department at Mudd offered to give us bloggers cameras to take pictures of the things we blog about. I just got mine today, so in honor of this fine event I present pictures of my new camera as taken by my old (bulkier) camera.

I would also like to mention that this is the way packages should be. Notice how everything is packed nicely inside with no glaring empty, unused space? Also there's none of that infernal "clamshell" packaging that is impossible to open in a manner that is either safe or neat (I have a scar on my right hand from when I was about 7 years old trying to open one of those).

Finally, I finally broke down and installed the camera software for this camera to check it out. In the past I've always regarded that as junk that is a cheap imitation of decent photo software, but it's actually quite nice to be able to plug the camera into the computer and automatically transfer the images to a destination of my choosing and delete them from the memory card. I was also gratified to learn that by simply plugging the camera into my Ubuntu Linux machine I was presented with nearly the same options without installing any software myself.


~KMarsh

Fire and Brimstone

Let's face it, fire is just fun. The show last night was amazing. A Different Spin put on a great act using all their toys (well...they didn't do any contact juggling, but that's really a bit much to ask). The show was set to some pretty high-energy music, including a techno remix of the Tetris song (search for Basshunter Tetris on YouTube). After the show they packed up and then I took them around Mudd looking for a place to hang out. They're a really cool bunch and since they're based in Oakland (near where I live when I'm not at Mudd) I'll probably hang out with them a bit over the summer. If you want to check out their website you can find it at www.adifferentspin.net.

~KMarsh

Great Craic

If you've read Trevin's blog you'll know that at Mudd we refer to something that's fun or addictive as "crack". I find it amusing, then, that in Ireland when something is fun they call it "good craic" (pronounced crack). I spent my spring break in Ireland visiting my girlfriend who is studying at the University of Limerick for the semester. The flight over was long as was the immigrations line at Dublin -- I actually had to start asking people to let me ahead of them in the line when I looked to be in danger of missing my connecting flight. I made it, but just barely.

Once I got to Ireland Liz and I started traveling...we went to several places around Limerick and then flew to London for a day. While in London we took a train to Stonehenge and then came back and saw Westminster Abbey and the National Gallery. Of particular note was the tomb of Sir Issac Newton, which we visited so we could shake our fists at the man who has caused generations of luckless science students untold misery.

Back Ireland we took a train to Dublin for a day trip and visited several sites of historic importance -- particularly the Guinness Storehouse which was leased by Arthur Guinness back in the day for 45pounds a year good for 9000 years. The company apparently finds various ways to give back to the Irish people what it saves on rent. We also went to visit a ruined castle that was destroyed by Oliver Cromwell. Most of two walls still stand and students from the university often walk down to it and throw parties there. On the last day of my trip we had a small party with a Tex-Mex dinner and watched Braveheart with an Irish bartender who has been kicked out of American bars for complaining that they don't pour their Guinness correctly.

You can see my photos here: http://tinyurl.com/2rhmut

~KMarsh

A Different Spin

Today a group called A Different Spin came to visit Mudd. They're a fire performing troupe based in Oakland, California. They came last year and we enjoyed it so much that we booked them again this year. They're scheduled for a performance at night (actually half an hour from the time of writing) but even better than that was the workshop that they held in the quad this afternoon. Starting at 13:00 they broke out their toys and started teaching people how to juggle balls and clubs, spin poi and twirl staffs. I learned poi spinning from a junior and senior who taught it as a student-taught PE class my freshman year and really enjoy it. These guys taught me the basics of juggling in about 10 minutes last year even though I had never been able to learn before. This year one of them taught me how to crack a bull whip.

A whip is a really incredible object; I'm going to go into science mode for a few minutes to explain it. If you've ever held a rope, chances are you've laid it on the ground and shaken it up and down to produce a wave that travels along and falls off the end. A whip is exactly that with one extra bit: if you were to tie a light, thin rope to the end of a thicker rope and send a wave along the thicker rope when it hit the thin rope it would continue along, but it would go faster. The equation is v=(F/m)^(0.5) where v is the speed of the wave, F is the tension on the rope, and m is the mass per unit length of the rope. Thus as the rope gets lighter, the wave moves faster. A whip is tapered, so it's constantly getting lighter which means the wave gets faster and faster until it falls off the end. At that point it's traveling along individual fibers teased out of a piece of string tied onto the end called the "cracker". When the wave is on these fibers it's traveling extremely fast and when it falls off the end the cracker breaks the sound barrier and a sonic boom is created.

When you whip a towel you'll find that you need to pull back after you fling it out in order to get it to snap at all. That's because the wave along the towel does not speed up, so you need to pull back to get any speed at the end. A whip does not, and you crack a whip by flicking it straight out in the direction opposite the one it's pointing in -- that creates a kink or loop that propagates down to the end, and if it's tight enough, the whip cracks. Of course, the trick is to get it to crack away from you. I'm slightly embarrassed to say that this was the most fun I've had in a long time with that picture of my arm as evidence. I'm off to the show now, but I'll let you know how it went and how my trip to Ireland last week went in the next few days.

~KMarsh

Mish-mash of Updates

It's been a while since my last post. Two Sundays ago I went to the circus training school in Redlands with a group of people arranged by math professor Rachel Levy and spent an enjoyable afternoon learning static trapeze, tumbling, and other fun physical activities from the people there. I was planning on doing a major post about it once I got access to some of the pictures, but I haven't gotten any so I'm going to forge ahead for now -- this post will be mostly me updating on what's happened recently, so if you want to hear about anything more in-depth, just ask.

My eye is better, so that's good. Those eyedrops itched something terrible.

In big news right now, as many of you probably are aware, Super Smash Bros. Brawl was released in the United States on Sunday, March 9th. Smash Bros. is one of the more popular group video games here at Mudd, so we were all eagerly awaiting its arrival. I went with my roommate to a friend's house in the next town over (Badier graduated last year but we still hang out with him on occasion) on Saturday night and picked up the game at its midnight release then played for 8 hours. It was one of the worse decisions I've made this semester, but I knew it was going to be and decided to deal with it.

I am going to be orientation photographer during freshman orientation next year! Orientation happens the first week or so before classes begin in the fall and it's a time for the freshmen to get adjusted to the school and to life away from home without worrying about classes or upperclassmen. The freshmen get grouped together in "sponsor groups" of about 5 frosh each and get taken under the wing of an upperclassman "sponsor" who takes them through orientation and answers any questions they may have. I'm not exactly a sponsor, as I won't have an assigned group, but I will be the photographer for orientation so I'll be there working with the freshmen. Maybe I'll see some of you there.

Last weekend was a conference here at Mudd to discuss the possibility of an aero center at the college and I was invited as a student panelist. This warrants an entire post of its own, so I'll leave it at this for now.

Finally, I'm heading off to Ireland for spring break this year. My girlfriend is studying abroad at the University of Limerick this semester and I'm going to visit her for the entirety of break. I'm getting very excited, since my flight leaves on Friday at the end of this week. I have far too much stuff to get done before then....

Okay, this is sad. I got up for class today and then when I got here I realized that I managed to knock my clock ahead an hour when setting the alarm last night, so I was an hour early. That's always a terrible thing (remind me to tell you that story from freshman year sometime), but I went off to breakfast and then came back and started this post to kill the time before class. Class time rolls around and still there's no one here. I don't remember anything about there not being class today, but it seems that not only did I wake up an hour early, I didn't actually have to wake up for this class at all today.

~KMarsh

Surprise Trip to the ER

Today could have gone better. I had a couple of meetings in the morning, ending at 11:30. I ran into one of my friends on the way back to my dorm and stopped to chat with him; we had a positively wonderful conversation swapping stories of the mad chemists we know (one of mine involved 300lbs of mercury in an unregistered home lab and one of his was about a prank involving a weak contact explosive on the underside of a toilet seat with the added benefit that one of its components was iodine, so it stained the unlucky prankee a deep purple).

While swapping said amusing anecdotes, I got something in my eye and tried to rub it out. It didn't come out and when I looked at my eye in the mirror it was kind of yellowish and goopy looking. Not goop on top of the eye...the white part seemed to be gellifying. I was understandably disturbed by this and called my grandfather who is a retired doctor to ask his opinion. He said that I'd scratched it and had some conjunctivitis, basically an infection in my eye; the yellowish stuff was similar to pus, and I needed to go to an optometrist or the ER and have them take out whatever was in there and give me antibiotic eye drops. My roommate, on the other hand (doomed to grow into one of those mad chemists, I'm sure) told me that if they tried to take my eye out I wasn't to let them.

After running the gamut to settle the insurance issues I got in the car to go to the emergency room and spent a lovely part of my day sitting in the waiting room. After I was seen they sent me back with the eye drops Poppy told me they would give me and a suggestion to take some Claritin to keep me from itching it.

All told, I'm back now and my roommate is happy to see that I still have both my eyes. The eye drops they gave me had a sheet in the box describing what's in them including detailed chemical structures. Because we're Mudders, I'm going to show that to my roommate to see what he can say about it.

~KMarsh