Culinary Adventures

The food at the Hoch isn't bad, but the menu's on a weekly rotation. What usually happens is that the pre-frosh think "Wow, this food is pretty good!" By the eighth or ninth week of first semester, you realize that, while the food is good, you sure have eaten this a lot. By sophomore year, you find that even when you're on vacation, you wake up Tuesday and expect to have tacos for lunch.

To help combat this, some of my friends and I make our own food every Friday night. Our "recipes" usually look something like this:

What Is This Stuff? It Tastes Pretty Good Soup
(Serves you and 10 of your closest friends)
Ingredients:
whatever vegetables at the grocery store looked good
a couple cans of beans, for protein, I guess
some soup that none of your friends are allergic to

1) Mix all ingredients in large soup pot. Begin cooking.
2) Realize you need spices. Add the ones that smell good.
3) Remember that you bought parsley. Add parsley to soup.
4) Realize that soup is not thick enough. Find rice. Add rice to soup until you think you've added the right amount.
5) Wait until rice is cooked.
6) Serve. Avoid all questions as to what recipe you used.



We're also masters at making "this is kind of like applesauce but I forgot the potato masher" and "weirdest pancakes ever" (like normal pancakes, but fluff the eggs and use yogurt instead of milk). I've also discovered the magic of microwaveable macaroni and cheese with bell peppers that you cooked in your friend's electric wok. And the longer I stay at Mudd, the more creative I'm becoming about my food choices. Ritz crackers with cream cheese! Cheerios with strawberry jelly! I wonder what will happen if I add this to the spaghetti sauce! (I have, in fact, eaten all of these things. Cheerios with strawberry jelly is a better food than one might think.)

On another food-related note, I'm staying at Mudd for Thanksgiving. Enough Easties do this that we have our own Thanksgiving meal, for which we cook a metric ton of turkey, vegetables, and pies, and take over most of the kitchens on campus to do so. I'm making spiced carrots and a lemonade pie.

This semester is kind of hectic. Update coming this weekend.

There will be no immediate post this weekend. I was sick last week, and right now I'm doing all of my makeup work. I'll try to post twice (that's right, twice!) this week to make up for it.

Well, now that I've been back at school for a few weeks, I can start updating this blog again.

My literature class so far is really interesting--we're reading a lot of books by Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens, and we're also learning a lot about Victorian England. On Wednesday, I gave a presentation on "changes in perceptions of time, speed, and distance in the Victorian Era" with three other people in the class. It's much more interesting than it sounds. For example: did you know that people thought the telegraph would solve all the world's problems by allowing everyone in the world to talk with everyone else? Or that the invention of the telephone was seen as an unimportant step in the process of improving the telegraph? Or that France wanted there to be a Paris Mean Time instead of a Greenwich Mean Time? See, more interesting than you thought, isn't it?

This semester, I have also discovered the joy of cooking. You see, at Mudd, you can sign up for getting 8, 12, or 16 meals a week from the dining hall. Last semester, I had 16 meals a week. This semester, I instead decided to opt for having 12 meals a week, a minifridge, and a microwave. (And since I bought my appliances from other students, a refrigerator and a microwave cost $20.) Since some of my friends have kitchens and others have rice cookers and electric woks, I've started to get more creative with my meal replacements. I can make macaroni and cheese with bell peppers. I can make sodas using seltzer water and juice. I'm probably making banana bread sometime soon, since my bananas are going brown faster than I anticipated. The possibilities are not quite endless, but I find them more appetizing than the food at the dining hall.

I also built a desktop at the beginning of this semester. It was a lot more complicated than I anticipated--a good 4 hours elapsed between when I opened the boxes and when I turned the computer on. I'm right now trying to figure out a way to make Windows work without making all my USB ports stop working. On the plus side, I now know the identity of every part in my computer--something I never knew before. This is also the first time I've built a desktop from scratch, so now I know how all of the hardware fits together.

[Edit:] Apparently building a computer is also a laboratory assignment for E85. Kind of neat to know.

End-of-Semester Recap

Right now, I'm taking a break from packing. About 75% of my room is currently in either the packed or almost-packed stage. There's folded clothes on my bed waiting to go into a suitcase, boxes waiting to go into storage, and trash waiting to be, well, taken to the trash. As I'm going through my stuff, I find all these things I'd forgotten about--"Wow, that was a good book! Hey, I remember taking this (now-returned) test! Oh, look, math notes!" And, well, it's been a busy semester.


Classes I've Taken:

Math 14: Every math class I've taken at Mudd has had a spectacular teacher. Math 14 was no exception. Sadly, Prof Gupta was a visiting professor, and will be gone next semester. We'll miss him, and the lemon squares he baked for his classes.

Chem 22: It's Frosh Chem! For once, some parts of chem--like Quantum--made sense. Others--like Thermochemistry--still didn't.

Physics 24A: This year, for the first time, there was an advanced section of the Mechanics Physics class. I'm really glad I could take it, because it meant we spent less time on things like energy (which I understood) and more on rotational dynamics (which I didn't understand).

Intro to Social Psychology: This class was awesome. Really, really awesome. It almost turned me into a Psychology minor. (At Mudd, we call them concentrations. Really, it's the same thing.) I also read two really good books, The Lucifer Effect and The Power of Persuasion, for this class. It was more work than some of the other Hum classes, but I learned a lot, and it was definitely worth it.

E4: E4 had its ups and its downs. On the one hand, I made some new friends and built a compost sifter. On the other hand, it was a lot of work.

Jazz: I had to drop my jazz class halfway through the semester, because spraining my finger meant I was out of practice for a month. I'll be going back Spring semester of next year, because Jazz is how I destress.

Other Stuff:

Coding: From hanging out with programmers, I've learned a lot about coding. (For example, that Python alarm clock I wrote with Aren a few weeks back. I'm still working on porting it to Linux.)

Writing: After not writing for a while, I'm finally writing short stories again. Most of them aren't good, but it keeps me sane.

Computers: I have a new computer now, and I'll probably be building a desktop next semester. I've figured out enough about hardware that I'd feel confident doing so.

Fun: Despite all the work we have to do here, I've had a lot of fun: watching anime with my friends, having fights with foam rockets on the lawn in front of East, watching bad movies, and playing truth-or-dare.

This summer, I'll be in Memphis, getting a job and spending time with my Memphian friends. If anything Mudderly comes up over the summer, I'll write about it here.

Hard Drive: Dying (& Python alarm clocks!)

The hard drive on my computer is dying--for certain definitions of "dying". Here's what I've gathered from my knowledge of hard drives (which is not a lot compared to most Mudders but a fair amount compared to the average person):

• My hard drive is partitioned. This is basically the hard drive equivalent of rooms in a house. Some houses have one room--you can get to all of your stuff without changing rooms, but you have to share a room with all your siblings, and if that room gets messed up, your entire house is a mess. I partitioned my hard drive to have 1 partition (like a "room") for Linux programs, 1 partition for Windows programs, 1 partition for stuff (like music, videos, and schoolwork), and 1 partition as a swap (which artificially extends your computer's memory, but is slower than real memory). For some reason, Windows gave itself a partition of its very own, separate from the one I made for it. From what I've gathered, it has important OS stuff like "how to make sure Windows actually runs."
  
• The Windows program partition is destroyed.
• The Windows OS partition is beyond destroyed. Metaphorically speaking, it was set on fire. Then the fire was put out and it was demolished. Then it was set on fire again.
• The data partition is sort of working. There's some stability issues leaking through from the Windows program partition, but so far everything seems to be intact.
• The Linux partition is just fine.

What appears to have happened is that the part of the hard drive that reads the rest of the hard drive can't read most of the Windows stuff. According to some Eastie folks, the entire hard drive will be gone within a week. I have another hard drive in the mail from the friendly folks at Lenovo, but putting all my stuff back on the new drive (& reinstalling Linux) is going to be pretty time-consuming. It's a good thing I don't have class next week, or I'd probably be without a computer until the summer.

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In other news, another Mudd frosh and I have written an alarm clock for Linux in the programming language Python. It takes the time you want to wake up and a file path to a song (or video) as input. Then, it figures out how many seconds it is until you want to wake up, and waits for that many seconds. Then it turns the volume on your computer down to 0, opens a media player, and tells the media player to play the song (or video) you gave it. After that, it increases the volume every few seconds until it gets to maximum volume. Sure, it would be simpler to use a real alarm clock, but this is a lot more fun. Over the week that we don't have class, I'll probably be tinkering with this program to make it work in both Windows and the Mac OS.

Building a Compost Sifter

My E4 team has been building for the past few weeks, and our compost sifter is finally nearing completion! All we have left to build are the cam (which will lift and drop the frame) and the screen holder.

Here are some pictures of our accomplishment!


This is Claire, standing in front of the lumber we used to build the compost sifter. We used 4 by 4's for the front post and 2 by 4's for the rest of the frame.


Some of the wood we just screwed together with 4" screws. (We had to drill pilot holes first, or the screws would get stuck.)


For corners, we used brackets to hold the wood together and then screwed the brackets to the wood.



This is Daniel bracing the frame of the compost sifter while someone (not shown in picture) drills on another part of the frame. Our sifter will be a little over 4 feet tall when we're finished.

This is the almost-finished sifter (minus screen and cam). When it's finished, there will be an aluminum pole on the front with a cam on it. When the cam spins, the frame that holds the screen will raise and then drop, forcing the compost through the screen.

That's a picture of the screen-holder frame lifted up from the rest of the sifter. The rubber that will cushion its fall (to make it not deafeningly loud) is from an old bike tire that the Pitzer bike shop gave us.

.............................................

E4 has, at times, been really fun. Building this compost sifter was fun (for the first 2 consecutive hours in the machine shop; after that, I get bored and have to take a break). My current group is really awesome--we're pretty laid-back, so it's easy not to get stressed even when we have a lot to do. Other parts of E4 have been less fun--for example, being in the shop at 11:30 on a Saturday night, trying to learn how to do carpentry for the first time (while building), and not knowing the physics you need to know to model all of your designs (some of which have pretty complicated physics). The engineering curriculum here is a lot of work. When I say a lot of work, I mean a lot of work. My team spent most of Friday and Saturday building. (We did it in 2-person shifts, so we didn't all have to be there the whole time, but that's still a lot of time in the machine shop.) We still have some building to do, and then we have to finish writing up a tech memo which sums up everything we did and then make a presentation detailing everything we did. If you really enjoy every part of the engineering process--not just the design and the building, but the write-ups and the presentations and the organizational things--then you'll love it. If you're like me, you like designing and building things, but not all the other stuff. I'm changing my major to CS because the other stuff is a substantial enough portion of the engineering curriculum to deter me. I still like building stuff. I still like figuring out how things work. I just can't make myself interested enough in all the other parts of the engineering curriculum to really enjoy an engineering major. I really liked CS my first semester. Programming and engineering are really quite similar--you're trying to make a [thing] that performs [function]. So, in a sense, I'll still be making things. Just different things than I thought I would make when I first came to Mudd.

Schedule

Other Mudder bloggers have been posting their assorted schedules. Mine's actually going to be pretty typical for a frosh changing majors to CS.

As a background note, Mudd has a core curriculum. Most students have finished it by the end of sophomore year. The core schedule is quite nice the summer before freshman year, when your friends are all talking about having to rush to their school's website to sign up for classes before they all fill up. Core classes take up progressively less time in your schedule as you go through more of the curriculum and help you figure out what you want to major in.

• Electricity, Magnetism, and Optics (abbreviated as E&M): The final core physics class. I'm also taking the associated lab for this class.
  
• Multivariable Calculus II & Introduction to Probability and Statistics: Core math classes, half a semester each.
  
• Introduction to Computer Science. I decided near the end of March that I wanted to major in CS, so I'm taking the first non-core CS class.
  
• Discrete Mathematics. This is a requirement for CS majors, but is also reputed to be quite a fun math class.
  
• Dickens, Hardy, and the Victorian Age. This is the unusual class in my schedule. Every 2 years, Professors Groves (a literature professor) and Eckert (a Physics professor) teach a class that consists of reading, discussing, and writing about books written by Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. The class culminates in a trip to England over the second half of winter break.

This is a pretty normal schedule for a third semester: it contains the core Physics class (and its lab), two half-semester core math classes, a class in a major I'm seriously considering, a humanities class, and a fifth class.

Common variations on the third-semester schedule:

• Some freshmen take the rest of the core math program over the summer, opening up 3 hours of space(an average class) in their schedule. Most of them fill that space with a technical elective.
  
• The "fifth class" is STEMS, the core engineering class. Most of the people who do this are engineers, because STEMS is a prerequisite for a lot of engineering classes.
• The "fifth class" is the required Biology class. This frees up 3 hours of space in the spring.
• The "fifth class" is a Humanities class. People who do this are usually taking E&M and two difficult technical classes. Whether or not this actually decreases your workload is debatable, but it does give you more space in your week wherein you're not doing problem sets.
  

Prefrosh Weekend

I was going to put up a bunch of pictures of happy laughing prefrosh. But most of them didn't want me to take their picture, so instead:



Mudders, looking for prefrosh, so that the Mudders can show the prefrosh where their dorms are.




Yay, it's Prefrosh Weekend!


Other than that, it's time for some Fun Mudd Facts!

Fun Fact #1:
Mudd has 4 "quad" dorms. They are shaped like the letter "U" and are the closest to things like the dining hall and the classrooms. They are laid out and named like this:

South-----------------North

West------------------East

There's actually a reason they have those names:
In the beginning, Mudd had one dorm: East. It was called "East" because it was the eastmost building on campus. North and West were built after East. North was north of East, and West was west of East. So, of course, those dorms were called "North" and "West." Then Mudd built a fourth dorm. Mudders, seeing that there was a fourth dorm and four cardinal directions, began calling it "South."
South was, and still is, the northernmost of all the dorms. But Mudders don't let that stop them from calling it "South."

Fun Fact #2:
Mudd has a relatively large building known as "Platt." The first floor contains offices and a large open space with lots of couches. The second floor has Jay's (a pizza place), the offices for Facilities and Maintenance (F&M), and a large music practice room.
Platt used to be Mudd's dining hall. Platt is no longer Mudd's dining hall because Platt is way too small to be Mudd's dining hall. But it makes a pretty nice building for offices and the Platt living room.

Fun Fact #3:
The Mudd campus gently slopes downhill from the dorms to the classrooms. This makes skateboarding (or scootering, or bicycling, or rollerblading) to class very simple. Based on a completely nonscientific visual survey of people I see going to class in the morning, I'd say between one-third and one-half of all Mudders take some sort of wheeled transportation to class. Of those, about half are skateboarders. Of the remaining users of wheeled transportation, about two-thirds use bikes, and most of the rest use scooters. I also regularly see two people who rollerblade to class.
(It's also highly recommended that you use some form of wheeled transportation if you take a class at another of the 5Cs, especially if you take a class at Pomona. Why? Pomona is about a mile away, and you have 10 minutes between classes.)

There may be more pictures during the weekend (especially if my E4 group begins building this weekend). If not, look for my update next week!

Assorted Update

A while back, I went to the Getty Museum with a friend of mine. As it turns out, getting to the Getty without a car is time-consuming, but not too hard. We took a train to downtown L.A., then took a bus to another bus to the museum. Our motivation: the Getty is free.



This is a fountain at the Getty Museum. The Getty is one of the few art museums I've seen that is artfully designed, instead of being an assortment of blocky square rooms with tan and gray walls.



This is the view from the top balcony of the Getty museum, which is on top of a hill near downtown L.A.

The Getty has a nice permanent art collection as well as good traveling exhibits, so we got to see a lot of quality art while we were there. (There aren't any pictures of the art, because it was all inside.) I also got to see some illuminated manuscripts, which was really neat.

Second: Some friends of mine are going to be Time Suck next year. Time Suck is a suite in East, traditionally made up of sophomores, whose job is to entertain East Dorm with movies, small parties, marathons of TV shows, and the like. I'm pretty excited, because this means I'll be able to help organize all the fun that Time Suck plans.

I've been inundated with coupons for pizza and Bed Bath and Beyond recently. (Tip: if you want a lot of coupons from Bed Bath and Beyond, have them ship you something. They will send you coupons for the rest of your natural life.) This puts me in an interesting situation for two reasons. First, the pizza coupons are all things like "10% off a medium pepperoni pizza and a side of chicken". I'm a vegetarian, so I'm definitely not ordering a pepperoni pizza anytime soon. Second, I'm never going to use my Bed Bath and Beyond coupon, because I don't have a car and I already have everything I would buy from Bed Bath and Beyond (with the possible exception of a chair that, despite my liking for it, would take up too much of the remaining floor space in my dorm room). I'm giving the BBB coupons to next year's Time Suck, on the grounds that Time Suck could always use one more bean bag chair, but I still can't find anyone who wants a cheap pepperoni pizza.

In other Mudder news, this Sunday starts the Accepted Students Program. During this program, the campus gains an extra 150 to 200 people--prospective students (known as "prefrosh") who've been accepted to Mudd and have decided to visit. (Although prefrosh can visit at other times, the school has a lot of special prefrosh activities during ASP.) Although I can't host prefrosh (because I currently live on Scripps), I'll be taking prefrosh to their host's dorms on Sunday morning and entertaining the prefrosh that all of my friends will be hosting. I'll also be carrying my camera around, so look forward to pictures of prefrosh weekend sometime this week.

That's all for this week, folks. I'll see you next week with tales of ASP.