It sucked... That's it.
Ok. See you next blog.
Well not actually. It's true that it was quite a difficult time. There is nothing more depressing than a silent and empty apartment, so I became quite familiar with my Pandora internet radio stations (http://www.pandora.com/) and took a lot of time for myself in the evenings to watch movies and even paint and draw some. In all, it was a very loooooong time, but I guess I survived pretty well.
As many people already know, after our second semester I began frantically prepare for the World Congress on Computations Mechanics 2008 (WCCM8). This was made more exciting by the fact that I was to present my research in front of a large group of experts only a month and a half after I started the project. Needless to say, after Amanda shipped out, I was a research machine. My project is on the 3D fragmentation of materials using a method called Molecular Dynamics. It is exciting because nobody has done 3D simulations of fragmentation before (basically) and that it can apply to the atomic scale, where the processes of crack growth and branching truly originate. What I do is make a big system of atoms (organized grid of dots with some mass) and pull on them really fast and watch them shatter. I then count the fragments and measure their size. It is commonly believed that fragment size distributions are scale independent, so my results could also apply to events like the expansion of the universe, to ballistic impacts. Anyway, my time quickly ran out, and I nervously boarded my first trans-atlantic flight. I went from Harrisburg to Phily to Frankfurt, Germany to London to Venice. I was quite tired by the end of it. I met my advisor, Derek Warner, in London. After arriving in Venice, we took a land taxi (how touristy) to the main island of Venice. We then tried to figure out the water bus system. After realizing what we were standing in was a water bus stop, not the bus itself, we jumped on a random bus and stared as the Venician houses and gondolas and other water buses full of tourists passed by. We eventually landed at the stop outside of the San Marco Plaza. I desperately needed to change out of my suit and get out of the 85 degree heat, but we couldn't find a way out of the strip of venders. We eventually asked someone, and later someone else, for help. I must admit I was immediately awestruck with the maze of busy alleys we traveled through. My internal navigation consisted of the list of shops that we passed. For example, "go right at first bridge, left at the underware store, left at split in alley, right in about 20 feet, left at grand canal, first bus stop" was one of they infinitely many paths we could take from the hotel to one of the nearby bust stops. Our hotel was very nice. It was painted a shade of turquoise and had the most ugly chandeliers. The view was amazing, however.
This was the view from hotel window,
and this is the view at night.
After meeting with some of the other Cornell professors staying in the same hotel, we discovered that the San Marco Plaza wasn't the strips of shops we encountered when we first got there, but the giant open area pictured below.
The San Marco Cathedral in all its glory.
The tower at San Marco.
The tower from the grand canal (from a water bus on my way to Lido Island).
Each morning, I would wander from my hotel through the San Marco Plaza to the bus stop. I would then take a water bus to Lido (a large beach-lined barrier island where my conference was located) then a land bus to the conference center. It probably took 30-60 min. per trip depending on which bus I could catch. I also did a fair bit of wandering while looking for restaurants and such.
This is another cool looking cathedral just around the corner from San Marco.
Cute little houses like these were the tops of every store, which made up 90% of the buildings in Venice. Almost all of them looked the same.
This is an interesting statue of a woman and a winged lion (winged lions were a theme of Venice) beside the bus stop. At one point, I took a wrong bus on the way back from the conference and ended up on some random island of Venice. I was a little nervous until I found the signs with arrows that would guide me to San Marco. On that trip I saw the beautiful plaza below, and an irish wolfhound (the largest breed of dog).
After I took this picture, random tourists would turn around, look at the view, and take pictures as well. I was amused.
I had to include a picture of a water bus. This is one parked at a water bus stop (the yellow thing) at Lido. I was rather busy when at the conference, but took some time one day to read a little in the tree covered area outside of the conference venue in the casino building. Other days, I would just cross the street, go through a small gate, and be on a beach. It was very strange to be in such an intense academic environment, then in some Italian "Ocean City" equivalent in 15 seconds.
The pine trees in front of conference venue where I stopped to read.
There is so much more to tell about my trip, that you'll just have to inquire about personally. Other highlights included many dinners with professors from all over (germany, france, etc.) and meeting my academic grandfather (advisor's advisor) and my academic aunt (his new student also working on fragmentation). I also had Gelato after every dinner, and snuck into the conference banquet where I enjoyed a wonderful conversation ranging from career aspirations and advice to the current theories about the birth and existence of the universe to debating if faith in another person's work constitutes knowing something (I know it's true and can use it in my work because this expert says it's true).
In my time before leaving and the week after, I got to practice my grilling technique.
This is a photo of my grilled Salmon and home fries.
Here are some potatoes in classic fry form,
and here is a zucchini in its not-so-classic fry form.
I also made some awesome cajun chicken and corn on the cob. I also got to be artsy for the first time in a long while. Below is a colored charcoal of a leaky faucet. Amanda has already laid claim to it I'm afraid.
Charcoal of leaky faucet (not ours). I also participated in the Ithaca Festival Paint off. This was a simple event where you paint something in 4 hours, the give it to the Ithaca festival for sale in an online auction. I would get half the profits and the festival committee gets the other half. Its been over a month since they were supposed to post the site. Whenever it is posted, I will put up the link. Until then... enjoy the gift of our rare but wonderfully colorful blog entries.
