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February 26, 2008
222222
I figured that Chris would really appreciate this post. Or Ryan or Jacob or Adam or any of my other stats-oriented friends. My car turned a pretty rare milestone on my way back from PSCG men's group tonight at Otto's: the big 222,222! I mean, sure, it's cool to see a string of zeroes when your car's odometer turns a 10,000 multiple, but how much cooler is it to see six identical digits on the odometer? I'm thinking way cooler, just because of how rare it is. Especially with how poorly so many American cars were made during the 80s and early 90s, I'd assume that perhaps the majority of American people have been deprived of the simple pleasure of even getting one chance to see their car's odometer reach the first of these milestones at 111,111. And then how much rarer is it to see a string of six crooked numbers on your dashboard like that? I tell you what, I consider myself pretty lucky! ;-) Ever since I got back from my trip to Cornell, I knew that it'd happen one of these days when I was just driving around State College, so I've been keeping a close eye on it and my camera handy, haha. I was ready to pull off into some parking lot if necessary to park and take the picture, but I managed to get all the way back home without it flipping to 222,223, which would've totally ruined the moment. (And Walter, is this speed better for you than my last mileage pic? Haha.) If I can get my car up to 230,000 (at my current mileage rate, that'd probably happen sometime in spring 2009), that'll be pretty cool too. 234,567 would be pretty sweet also (late 2009-early 2010?). It just won't be able to top the coolness of 222,222!
Posted by Jared at 11:59 PM | Comments (3)
February 24, 2008
The Stallyns' Streak Survives
Aye cabeza, the losing streak for the Wild Stallyns will fester for another year. We had hoped to send Vic and Nat out with a W to end their IM basketball careers, but we just couldn't do it. The other team played full-court man-to-man pressure and ran up and down the court the entire first half, pulling out to a 24-13 lead at the break. Then in the second half they mostly stopped pressing, but then started nailing three-pointers, and pulled away to a 44-27 win, keeping us winless since 2005. Sigh. Here's my final pathetic line for the season:
17 Min, 0 Pts, 0-3 FG, 1 Reb, 0 Ast, 1 TO, 0 PF
We haven't yet gotten a decent all-snow winter storm here in central PA so far this season. There was another storm late last week that was getting some of the snow geese honking in Walker, but I was rightfully pessimistic all along. While some people were wishcasting possibly 6-8", I maintained my prediction of a measly 2-4" with some afternoon sleet. And what did we get? About 3" or so. Some of the snowflakes on Friday morning were monstrously huge though, the size of down feathers! If only that snow could've sustained itself, we might've been able to get a more substantial accumulation.
So as many of you know, I had originally planned to take a 3-week holiday to Australia with my cousin Jonathan in Aug/Sep 2008, but last fall we decided to push that back to 2009 sometime. I'm still planning for that 2009 trip and already looking forward to it immensely, but might I get a chance to visit Australia this summer too? I found out on Friday that there might actually be a possibility to go Down Under for a couple weeks or so. I'll say more about it later once I find out more info and if it starts looking a bit more likely, but it's definitely a tantalizing and exciting prospect!
Posted by Jared at 05:35 PM | Comments (0)
February 18, 2008
The Grape Lady
Some of Carl's astro buddies showed me this YouTube clip this weekend, and it's so hilarious that I just had to share it. Mind you, I do feel kinda bad about laughing so hard at this poor woman, but it's gotta be one of the funniest videos I've ever seen on YouTube. Take a look:
A music video has even been made about this incident, which is also so funny and so so wrong.
Now this one is just absolutely bizarre (I was also shown this one up at Cornell). There's really no other way to describe it. Japan is so weird (right, Josh?)...
And then this video from the Onion News Network could help give me some ideas how to communicate my research to the public, since some of my dispersion predictions with SCIPUFF can look somewhat similar, with many dangerous colored bands. ;-)
Tonight I went to see the movie "The Kite Runner" down at the State Theatre. It's an indie film about friendship, betrayal and making things right. (Don't worry, I'm not gonna give away any major plot spoilers.) It follows the story of a boy who grew up in Afghanistan prior to the Soviet takeover in 1979, fled to Pakistan and the United States with his father, and then returned to Afghanistan during the height of brutal Taliban rule. I thought the movie was quite excellent, and one of the best that I've ever seen, actually. It was really well done in my opinion, and fairly emotional; large parts of it made me smile and laugh, while others made me sad and others very tense and uncomfortable (such as the Taliban scenes, for instance). Almost the entire movie's dialog is in Dari Persian with English subtitles, and the movie's based on the best-selling book of the same name by Khaled Hosseini. I think I'll be looking to get the book in the near future, I've heard from people that it's very well written. At any rate, if you have a chance to see this film, go! I highly recommend it!
Posted by Jared at 11:55 PM | Comments (3)
February 17, 2008
Ithaca Is Gorges!
[On location in Ithaca, New York]
It's been a fun time visiting Carl up here in Ithaca so far. After I got up here Friday night (which was a bit of an adventure, considering Ithaca's messed-up street system ... seriously, Ithaca makes Eau Claire, Mankato and Saint Paul's streets all seem brilliantly laid out!), we hung out with some of his astrophysics grad student buddies and watched a movie ("Tsotsi," a really interesting South African film from 2005) on Carl's super-cool projector screen that he's got set up in his apartment. I wonder how much getting a system like that would cost...
Yesterday afternoon Carl took me on a bit of a walking tour of part of Cornell University's enormous, sprawling campus, which sits on a ginormous hill overlooking the city and Cayuga Lake, the longest of the Finger Lakes. Overall I think it's a prettier campus than Penn State's, and probably larger in area (even though Cornell only has maybe half the students of PSU), and a lot of really eclectic architecture.
Yesterday was an absolutely gorgeous (gorges?) day, about 25 degrees with a clear blue sky, a fantastic day for a walk and for taking pictures! From campus we took a walk down the spectacular Cascadilla Gorge, which links campus with downtown. The trail is "closed" in winter, but we were still able to make the trek down the icy and snowy steps 
(with extra caution at certain points!). It normally wouldn't take very long to walk the path through Cascadilla Gorge, but when you have two people like Carl & I who really love to take photos, it tends to take a bit longer. :-) But it was totally worth it, and the scenery was breathtaking!
We had planned to take in the Ithaca Chili Cookoff & WinterFest downtown, but the niceness of the day worked to our disadvantage, as the downtown area was totally packed. The lines were tremendously long even just to pay for the tickets with which you could sample the chili and wings from the various vendors, not to mention the long lines for the chili vendors themselves. Oh well. Neither of us really had the patience for all that queueing, so we made our way back up to campus so we could each get some work done until it was time for dinner and hockey.
Carl managed to score a couple tickets to the Cornell vs RPI hockey game. Hockey is *the* premier sport here at Cornell, and tickets are kinda tough to get as a result. It was a fun game to be at, as Cornell whipped Rensselaer 7-1. Hockey crowds are a really fun lot too (at least when the home side is winning!).
And now it's getting to be time get ready to head home to State College in a bit, as I've gotta be back before Bible study this evening. Hopefully the roads won't be too much of a mess, and I actually hope the precip this afternoon stays all rain. That'd definitely make the driving easier. Farewell from Ithaca!
Posted by Jared at 11:19 AM | Comments (0)
February 14, 2008
February Means Fifty-Hour Trivia
It's proving tough to get over the hump in basketball. You see, our meteo grad IM team, Wyld Stallyns, hasn't won a game since 2005. Though, to be fair, we didn't even field a team in 2006. But still, it's been three years since we've won a game. In our game last Thursday, we played tough in the first half (I even scored our team's first points, which is maybe a bad sign, haha), trailing 18-17. But then couldn't buy a basket in the second half (we all got really tired too) and lost 35-22. My line:
12 Min, 2 Pts, 1-3 FG, 5 Reb, 0 Ast, 1 Stl, 0 TO, 0 PF
And then in tonight's game, the other team only had five players, but they were all athletic and in better shape than we were, and kept running out on fast breaks to get easy points. That, and we had trouble with a bunch of easy shots inside. We still played them tough the whole game, trailing 18-13 at half, and losing 38-32 for a final score. My kinda pathetic line:
9 Min, 0 Pts, 0-2 FG, 1 Reb, 1 Ast, 0 Stl, 0 TO, 3 PF
We have one more shot at redemption next week, otherwise the streak will stretch into 2009. Ugh.
At least winter made a comeback around here in the last week or so, in tune with Phil's prediction. Back on Friday night and Saturday we got a nice 3 inches of heavy wet snow, which stuck to all the branches and everything, making the whole campus really pretty. 
It definitely made for a pleasant scene for our PSCG Leadership "Advance" (we didn't wanna call it a "retreat," haha) on Saturday for a few hours. It was pretty productive too, we got a fair amount of long-term planning done, and we're pretty excited about where we think God's leading the ministry in the coming months and years!
And then on Tuesday we got another pretty decent snowstorm, and it kept snowing and snowing all day. I really miss having days like that, where it just does nothing but snow all day long. We got 5 inches by Tuesday evening, followed by a tenth of an inch of ice on top of it 
by Wednesday morning (freezing rain when it's only 25 degrees at the surface? are you serious?), and then another couple tenths of an inch of snow around midday on Wednesday (when it was "snowing like a banshee" when I made my last post). It made for some pretty pictures on Tuesday night anyway!
Also on Tuesday night, a bunch of us went down to Zeno's to celebrate both Nat & Ethan's birthdays! It was really nice, the bar wasn't crowded at all, probably largely due to the snowy weather making it hard to get around. But hey, I'll take it! 
Robyn & Dan arranged to send Ethan on a big long scavenger hunt all around town and campus too, from Walker to The Diner to Webster's Cafe to Berkey Creamery to Pattee Library before he finally found a clue that led him to Zeno's where we all were. All while wearing a really zany hat/crown thing. It was pretty cool. :-)
And periodically through the weekend I was helping out Carl's team ("Carl Sagan Could Kick Chuck Norris' Butt") in the annual 50-hour KVSC Trivia Contest (KVSC is a campus radio station at Saint Cloud State University in Minnesota). I've participated in this rather insane trivia contest before, but for those of you who don't know what it is, 9 questions are read over the air per hour, and teams can use any resource they can find to try to locate the answers. The questions vary in difficulty, and correspondingly in point values (ranging from 10-125 points, typically) and the length of time that the questions are left open (5-40 minutes, typically). Each team then has to call in answers to the hotline for the various questions, and in theory each team could get a given question right before it's closed. So anyway, Carl had a group of people with him up at Cornell University, and I rounded up Walter, Jacob & Mario to help here at Penn State, and Chris to help out from down in Raleigh too (our multi-state team communicated answers and who was calling in via an AIM chatroom). Some of these questions are google-able, and some are not. For a sampling of the sorts of questions we got, here are a couple:
Q: (for 75 points) In the 2008 New Hampshire Democrat Vice Presidential Primary, there were two candidates on the ballot. Name both of them, and the town that was listed in parentheses below their names on the ballot.
A: Raymond Stebbins (Weymouth, Massachusetts), and William Bryk (Manhattan, New York).
I got that one for our team! Thank you Wikipedia (and then Google for the second guy's town)! And now for a second question (this one we didn't get):
Q: (for 40 points) "At the end of the February 27, 2007 show of Wheel of Fortune, Vanna White revealed that when she was young, she rolled what into her hair to straighten it?"
A: Orange juice cans.
Seriously, some of the trivia questions are absolutely insane. But you can use any resource, including company hotlines. Yes, I even called White Castle customer service at midnight on Friday night to ask what their 100-burger pack was called. :-) I helped out from 11pm-2am Friday night, and then 5pm-2am on Saturday, and when Carl and the Cornell guys called it quits at 4am Sunday morning, we were in about 42nd place or so, but we fell all the way to 56th place by the end (out of 78 teams). Jacob, Walter & Mario really liked it, and I think they're looking forward to doing it again next year, though with a bit more coordination with the Carl and his buddies up at Cornell. And maybe trying to organize it so that there's always at least a couple people awake and answering questions. That's really the key to doing well in a fifty hour marathon like this!
And speaking of Carl, I'll be heading up to Ithaca, New York, tomorrow afternoon to go visit him for the weekend! Should be a fine way to celebrate being a PhD Candidate at long last!
Posted by Jared at 11:51 PM | Comments (0)
February 13, 2008
I Passed Candidacies!!!
[Breaking news, on location in Walker Building]
WOOHOO!!! The meteo faculty had their meeting this morning to discuss the results of the January PhD Candidacy Exams, and Sue informed me afterwards that I passed both halves of it (dynamics and physics)!! I'm now officially a PhD Candidate! I've gotta give God a lot of credit, because I don't think I could've gotten through all that and done as well as I apparently did entirely on my own. I'm sooooo relieved, because I really didn't want to go through all that again in May. I had kinda put everything out of my mind for awhile, until I got Dr Shirer's email last week letting us know when the faculty meeting was gonna happen, which has made me pretty nervous again for the whole past week. But this'll definitely make the rest of the day go better, including my half-hour presentation in remote sensing class in just a little bit that I've been slaving away at!
In other news, it's currently snowing like a banshee outside (over 35 dBZ!). Snowflakes as big as feathers, seriously. It's really cool!
More updates to come later, including about a fifty-hour trivia contest!
Posted by Jared at 01:00 PM | Comments (3)
February 07, 2008
People That Shouldn't Vote
Someone please tell me this woman didn't cast a vote in the Super-Duper Tuesday primary elections this week...
I would also take comfort if I knew that most of these people weren't voting either (pay special attention to how the map is labeled in the second half):
I really hope that those are just the stupid people/answers that they picked out, and that they're not showing the overwhelming majority of people who got those questions right (I'm exempting people on the John Howard one though, because it's hard to expect people to know what foreign leaders look like... and btw, this is what John Howard, Australia's now-former Prime Minister, really looks like). But that might be too much to hope.
Posted by Jared at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)
February 05, 2008
Groundhogs and Turducken
You know how sometimes it'd be great to have a day between days, just to get everything done that you'd like to? Well, this weekend I could've used a couple of those days, just to sleep! It all started on Friday, when I had to spend much of the day trying to organize the ride situation to Punxsutawney for Groundhog Day. I had hoped that I wouldn't have to drive since I drove over there last year, but with how things were shaking out, I bit the bullet and said I'd drive. So with all that, plus looking at an apartment with Tim (and getting soaked in the pouring 34-degree rain on the walk home), practicing piano at the church, and then going to team trivia (our team was "Groundhog: Tastes Just Like Chicken" and ran away with 1st place, woot), I only had an hour-plus to try to get a nap in before we left for Punxsutawney. I think I might've fallen asleep briefly, but I could easily have been delusional...
It felt a little odd striking out from my apartment at midnight to pick up Ethan & Robyn and then Ryan, I must admit. With the meteo grads and PSCGers that were going, we had four carloads of Punxsy-bound people (including Chris & Amber, who drove up all the way from North Carolina to go groundhoggin'!), and it was a bit after 12:30 when we finally left State College. 
Ethan observed it was downright surreal to see a whole line of slow-moving cars on the road in the middle of nowhere between DuBois and Punxsutawney at 2am. And all for a rodent! We took the shuttle bus up to Gobblers Knob from the Wal-Mart, and got up there at 3:15am, just 15 minutes after the gates to the Knob opened. That allowed us to get a pretty sweet spot down fairly close to the stage, just off to the right side. A prime spot for our hurricane flags, if I do say so myself. :-) 
As the hours ticked away while we stood there in the cold, watching some of the dancing on stage and listening to some of the inane jokes and babble from one of the rookie members of the Inner Circle, they would occasionally announce, "Only 4 more hours until Phil's prediction!" or "Only 3 more hours!" and so on, which annoyed us greatly, because it reminded us not how close we were getting, but just how much longer we had to go. 
It was all amusing fun, though I was getting a bit stiff just standing there and holding the flagpole. There were so many people that showed up at Gobblers Knob though, and before the pre-dawn fireworks started up at 6:30, they announced that there were already over 10,000 people that had showed up to Gobblers Knob, and there was still a constant stream of buses bringing people up to the Knob right until Phil's prognostication at about 7:25, so there were probably somewhere between 12-15,000 people crammed in there. Seriously, the place was packed.
After a rendition of the Pennsylvania Polka, Phil's two handlers yanked him out of the stump and held him up high for all the world's TV cameras to see. And the proclamation that Phil "chose" read that he saw his shadow, meaning an additional six weeks of winter are yet to come. Never mind the fact that it was 100% cloudy with some light flurries falling. 
And never mind the fact that Punxsutawney Phil is only about 37% accurate in his prognostications, despite his status as the seer of seers and prognosticator of prognosticators. Phil has spoken: it won't be an early spring. And guess what the forecast for here is? After a brief warmup the next two days, an extended cooldown late this week well into next week. Hmmmm...
After Phil's befuddling prediction, which was soundly booed by the gathered throng, we high-tailed it out of there and hoofed it down the hill back into town, to wait in line at the Elks Club for one of the many pancake breakfasts offered throughout Punxsutawney (which means "town of the sandflies" in the Seneca language... seriously). 
Even with the long wait in line and once we got in there, it felt *so* good to sit down again! By the time we finally rolled out of Punxsy around 11:30am, I was more than ready to head for home. I was a bit drowsy in the last two-thirds of the drive home, but we made it back alright. I made sure to limit my nap to under two hours though, so that I wouldn't completely screw up my sleep schedule. I was still exhausted all through worship band practice on Saturday evening though.
When I got home from worship practice I turned on the TV, expecting Penn State to be trailing #7 Michigan State by 20 on the basketball court. I was jolted awake though when I saw PSU leading MSU 58-54 midway through the 2nd half! That was an eye opener, no mistake! Watching the rest of the game, I was riveted as the Nittany Lions held off a couple of Spartans runs, setting the normally docile Penn State crowd into a frenzy. The Bryce Jordan Center is usually rather like a mausoleum when basketball games are happening, so it was exciting to see the crowd roaring and jumping around with every Lions' basket, even if I had to settle for seeing it on TV. When it was all said and done, Penn State had shocked the #7 team in the country, Michigan State, by a score of 85-76, and the whole student section rushed the court as one. It was quite a sight! And it led off SportsCenter!! I'm so happy for Penn State basketball, this was a great win for them. It was their first victory over a ranked team since they beat #6 Illinois in Champaign in 2006, and their first victory over a ranked team at the Bryce Jordan Center since they beat #6 Illinois way back in 2001, so this was truly a HUGE win for the program. Now let's see if they can sustain this sort of effort the rest of the season, and maybe earn themselves some sort of postseason berth.
On Sunday, Jon & I hosted the annual meteo grads Super Bowl party, complete with the now-established tasty turducken tradition. 20 people showed up too, so our small place was rather full! It was a great time, and a great Super Bowl too. Unusually good. I didn't really care much for either the Giants or the Patriots, 
so I was cheering instead for my squares. That was really the only true allegiance I had for my cheering throughout the game. But even though my squares didn't win, we did get a great game, which was made all the more fun to watch because we had a couple actual Giants and Patriots fans in the room, 
which made things a bit more rowdy and fun than usual! And it was amazing to hear how quiet everyone got during the scintillating 4th quarter, after being so loud the whole first three quarters, even during the commercials (and I'd much rather people quiet down during Super Bowl commercials!). It was certainly one of the best and most entertaining Super Bowls I've ever seen, 
with the Giants pulling the tremendous 17-14 upset, and I can't say I'm disappointed with the outcome. I was kinda hoping the Patriots would win just so that we could stop hearing about the 1972 Dolphins every year, but then I was kinda hoping the Giants would win because the Patriots had become the insufferable bully-favorite. It's always more fun to cheer for David than Goliath!
And that's why I could still use a day or two to recover from the weekend!
Posted by Jared at 12:35 AM | Comments (1)