Hurricane incoming!

Hey, I'm back! It's been a while since I posted, and I have a lot to tell you. I'm still feeling a bit drained after the last few weeks with all the homework, tests, and whatnot, but I'm going to start forgetting if I don't post now.

Some music to get you started: Brahms' Cello Sonata 1. I'm going to try to play this with Forest, one of my friends on hall. He's an awesome pianist and hopefully I'll sound good too :D

Let's start with the road trip. 16 of 25 pledges departed MIT on Friday night before Columbus Day weekend, ready for a grand tour of the New England chapters of ADPhi. Our two vans traveled over 1000 miles going from MIT to Brandeis, Hamilton, Penn State, Columbia, Wesleyan, Yale, Brown, and finally back to MIT. The trip was certainly eye-opening to me, at least, to see how different each of the other chapters were from each other and from MIT. I have to say that I don't think I would have fit in at any of the other fraternity chapters, but the co-ed society chapters (Columbia, Wesleyan, and Brown) had a similar atmosphere to MIT. I think that a majority of us on the road trip - those of us who never thought we'd join a fraternity - were much more comfortable staying at those locations. (There's a little history behind the ADPhi Fraternity and ADPhi Society, which broke off a few decades ago when the argument over accepting women into the fraternity reached its climax. I think MIT has the best of both worlds, being part of the larger Fraternity system but still maintaing very close ties to the Society.)

I wish I had taken some good pictures, because the New England scenery was absolutely gorgeous. The endless expanse of autumn colors in upstate New York was so captivating. Hopefully I can see it again in the next four years.

Remember this?? Found in the Brown Chapter's library

While that was going on, Jaguar was working on a loft for our room. We have two singles and thought it would be awesome to live in one and have a spare room to do cool things in. We painted the sleeping room towards the beginning of the semester, but hadn't had time to do much else. We slowly collected wood from broken down East Campus projects and brought it up to the fifth floor. Before I left for the road trip, we came up with a design for the loft, and Jaguar and a couple of friends built it while I was away. Here are some pictures:
Painting:

Loft:

We decided to wedge the loft as tightly as we could against the walls for the sake of stability, and there is pretty much nothing short of using a sledgehammer that will make it budge. There is no ladder, so we just climb up into bed. There are some things that need improvements and we plan to add little things when we have time, but it's still the most awesome room I've slept in.

The other room is doesn't have much going on yet, but we have a giant chalkboard and whiteboard in there, which we've been using for homework. Maybe during our next big break we can do something interesting with it. 

I'm enjoying physics the most out of my technical classes, I think. I got my first (and probably only) 100 on a physics test, so I'm pretty happy about that. One of the coolest problems we've had for homework involves just basic forces, circular motion, and a little mathematic: A bucket of water is spinning with angular velocity w. Find an equation for the surface of the water. (Ignore the interaction between water molecules.)

(Couldn't get the spoiler tag to work. Highlight the text below to see the answer.)

Let z be the vertical axis through the center of the bucket, and r be the horizontal distance from the center. The surface is z=(w^2r^2)/(2g). It's such a simple answer for a problem I barely knew how to start. This is why I love math and science.

What else... My pledge class had "The Communist Party" at ADPhi. Being on the hosting end of a party was a lot of fun, and I think I enjoyed that more than actually partying. It was pretty successful, and we got a lot of people from other colleges around here, which is a good sign I think. That night, a few friends and I bought cookies and milk, climbed on top of the went to a place with a good view and had a picnic under the stars.

Now that my swing dancing class is over, I'm going to take ice skating. This is something that works pretty well with my decision to join ADPhi's IM hockey team. I haven't played yet, but we'll see how that goes.

And one final thing. Now I'm sure you've all seen Gangnam Style. But you haven't seen MIT Gangnam Style. Some of the awesome people in this video include: Eric Lander, head of the Human Genome Project; Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics; and Don Sadoway, inventor of a new technology called the liquid metal battery.

Until next time!

Raku