Wednesday October 1st, 2008

Today the sky is scary looking.
My violin came but the mail room is closed.
Calculus is so easy.
Shirley had her first Dr. Pepper a few weeks ago and loved it, so we bought a pack. to "drink responsibly."

how cute is that?

I got an 82 on my Chemistry Test. I was well-prepared mentally but not physically.

I was so nervous, and it took so long that I wanted to leave rather than check over it.
That was the worst mistake. I should have checked over it and caught the 2 errors that cost me 18 points. well 17. I lost one point because my answer was off by 0.001, and that's ridiculous because pretty much the whole class lost that point on account of the teacher doesn't even know what the rules are for significant figures and told us two different things both of which do not accord to the textbook. but the real answer was in the text book. So I learned who to believe. and that it's useless asking questions.

Really he's a nice guy, and tries to make chemistry interesting, but...
he doesn't teach from what he knows, he teaches from our textbook. I could just take notes out of the book and learn more efficiently than by paying attention to the lecture (which often contradicts the book because the teacher misunderstands).

Cliches come up and I attend (and pay attention to) every lecture. I've started to bring my book to class and follow along with the lecture so that I'm less likely to get bad information.
I'm going to ace the next chem test.

The calculus test was easy, though. I hope I didn't make any careless errors on it. I didn't have time to double check because I took the whole hour working the problems.
and I walked out feeling like a genius because math now requires ingenuity and not rote memorization of formulas.

Outside of school.. I volunteered to help register voters. In the last election, the percentage of students eligible to vote that actually voted was around 20% (I heard from a representative of the Obama Campaign). The people I asked all said they were registered to vote, except one who said she tried to register in Pittsburgh and couldn't, but we figure out the problem. I helped one person register to vote!

I quit after that because I have midterms. Chem and Calc are over, but next week I have Physics (some time next week we don't know when) and Engineering is supposed to be the 20th.

I signed up for the Outdoor Leadership Experience run by some eagle scouts for people in the honors college who never did outdoor leadership stuff. It's supposed to be in Laurel Ridge (where the physics thing was before). Laurel Ridge is just lovely.

Shirley Ma is so much fun. I'm glad she's my roommate, and we're like best friends. I'm also pretty glad we are taking the same typa classes. She's better at chem than I am, and I help her with physics and calc, and then we are in the same group for engineering so we do our programming hw together.

OH and you know Vampire Weekend, the really awesome band that I discovered on SNL? I get to go to a free concert this weekend because I am registered to vote. It's sponsored by the Obama campaign.

I finished writing my editorial, but I am going to look over it one more time and print it, because it weighs a lot in my grade.

I got an Engineers Without Borders t-shirt that looks really cool, and a Habitat for Humanity t-shirt that says on the back:

"my plans for Saturday..." with a floor plan under that hahha


I'll add more at some point.
bye

Sunday September 21st, 2008

My orderly nature regrets the awkward format of this post, but can take a little chaos now and then.

So this weekend...

My physics teacher last week asked for volunteers (he said he needed slave labor) to set up radio antennae and clean up his observatory (in the mountains an hour east of Pittsburgh). He offered to drive us, feed us, and let us sleep on the floor of the observatory deck (on the floor underneath an amazing sky dome) if we would help him this weekend.

I learned a lot while I was there, and met a lot of very nerdy physics-y people with whom I had amazing discussions.
I hope I get to go back.

Sleeping on the floor of the observatory was very uncomfortable, but totally worth it. There were only six of us who decided to stay overnight. I think only one of us actually slept. I started an alien discussion..

I saw more stars than I've ever seen in my life, and quite a few shooting stars. It was so exciting!

OH and the Milky Way. and the moon was sooooooooooooo bright. and I got to look at it through the little telescope.

There were some boy scouts/eagle scouts who started a fire for us, and we had s'mores. It's pretty chilly here! especially at night especially in the mountains.

There was an Italian guy from New York City who cooked pasta for everyone... and
Doc Stewart, the physics teacher, told us all about Mongolia. It was very amusing. : D

I attached a picture of me up about 16 feet in a tree which we had sawed the limbs off of to put up a tower next to.

Wednesday September 17th, 2008

I just got back from a speech by a motivational speaker.
It's diversity week, and the action committee at Hillel organized this activity.

He was a powerful speaker. He's quite an actor.

I have no idea how to convey the strength of his message.

One thing he related which I will never forget is that

the Golden Gate Bridge in San Fransisco is the #1 suicide spot in the world.
There are hundreds of stories
one is that a man committed suicide, and his psychiatrist searched his apartment for a note

the note was brief:

I'm walking to the bridge
If one person smiles at me along the way
I won't jump


This note was found after the man committed suicide.

TEARS. I'm still crying

I got a roll of toilet paper for the snot.

Smile at people... it could mean a lot.

Other than that...

I had engineering analysis today, and there was a quiz at the end. The quiz was to write "a simple program in MATLAB" that did a. b. c. d. e. f. g. and h.

It was hard.
It was supposed to take ten minutes but everyone took at least 30, my group about 40.

I think we succeeded at last.
Budny recognizes me as the girl who asks questions that stump him, and the girl who wears purple, and the only student in the class who brought a stapler. stapler girl. purple girl.

I got my letter of recommendation back, the one I was supposed to write about myself. I did pretty well
93%/ A

four points taken off for formatting??!! How can I be an engineer and make such careless errors...

I should have learned by now to remember my mistakes and not make them twice.
I have a pretty thorough resource on formatting now. took care of it.

yeahhhh I don't remember anything else interesting that happened today

ok bye

Monday September 15th, 2008

Well I'm listening to Stevie Wonder on YouTube, and taking vitamins.

I had stir-fry for dinner.
(I'm working backwards)
I did the cupid shuffle with Shirley.
We learned how to do matrix operations and write loops in MATLAB.
finally
because our teacher is back from Russia
he said there were a lots of Russians there.
He saw the Kremlin and said "heh."

I had a weird dream last night that I was trying to do computer programming and decided it would be a good idea to cut part of my right leg off. The reason for this dream I think is that one of my legs is slightly longer than the other so every year for about a week I have hip problems.

I got my contacts today and I got an index card divider and some Lewis Black cds.

I went to a lab meeting at noon at the vialab (Visualization and Image Analysis). www.vialab.org

They're working on a lot of different things.
There were about seven of us.
Dr. Stetten
Bing Wu- post-doc/professor at CMU Carnegie Mellon University
Bo Wang- undergrad at Pitt
Sam Horvath- a girl undergrad at Pitt I think a Junior maybe
Gaurav Shukla- a grad student at Pitt, pre-med wants to be a interventional radiologist
John Galeotti- a post-doc at CMU


John and Dr. Stetten went to MICCAI- the

International Society and Conference Series on

Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention

http://www.miccai.org/

and said that there were a thousand people approaching the same problem(?) in the same way (?) and we needed to come up with more ideas for an original approach in order to convince NIH (National Institute of Health) to give us money for research.

The grant proposals are due Nov. 5th for NIBIB and NHLBI, the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

Dr. Stetten knows someone at the Carnegie Museum. The Science Center is going to have a robotics exhibit, and one of our lab's projects is going to be in there. probably.

It's called a grab-a-slice. It has to do with making better output from a C-T Scan.. but I don't know how much I can tell you. ;)

There's also the OCT Penlight

and Fingersight

and the Big OLED sonic flashlight

and the Big LCD Holographic sonic flashlight

toward the end of the meeting, a delivery guy came with some expensive little piece of computer called a phase only spatial light modulator. Should I explain what that is?

They were all brainstorming to figure out what I could help with. Since Bing Wu is becoming a professor, and he usually works on psychophysical analysis of the projects by himself, Dr. Stetten suggested that I participate in the clinical trials. I don't know what exactly that would entail, but it sounds easy and fun. Psycho physics!!

I like the idea of combining technology with medicine and medical research..

especially

tissue regeneration, cardiovascular mechanics, psychological/ behavioral disorders

In the vialab, they're working on imaging things

like devices for the blind

and better images for use by surgeons and radiologists.

I met Dr. Richard Debski the other day. I asked if I could look around his lab and see what he's working on and I'm going to do that tomorrow morning. He works at the Musculoskeletal Research Center... it's pretty cool.

That's all I have for now, I have to go work on homework.