Prochain Arret: Italia!

Good afternoon/morning/etc upper east siders LMFers,

Just a quick update today since I have been off the radar for some people for some time. I have a flight at 6:50pm from Geneva to Rome, where I'll stay for 3 nights before going to Florence for 1 night and then come back to Lausanne with a quick stop at Milan.

Life has been going pretty well. A lot of lying down in the sun at a pool with some famous model friends travelling - I have taken weekend trips to Strasboug, Interlaken/Swiss Alps/Luzern, Lyon, and Paris, and day trips to Dijon and Gruyeres. It has been a busy summer.

I go back to the US on the 27th. I don't know when I'm going back to MIT - I assume around the 30th or so - and I'm kind of excited to go back. Before that though, I need to buy more awesome European clothes.

Actually now that it's almost the end of the summer, I kind of wish I had gone to my mansion in England and hung out with a prince taken more time to just chill on weekends because I'm quite exhausted, but it's been a pretty great summer. Surprisingly, I did get better at French a little - I think mostly in comprehension. I'm a lot less hesitant to use French now than before (French 3 made me not like French as much). Mostly when I use French it's for directions, I can form perfectly well-structured sentences now instead of trying to say "How do I get to...." I kind of got in the habit of just saying the destination in the best French pronunciation I can manage with a slight hint of question mark at the end. It has not failed me yet. I did buy a train ticket completely in French though; that was fun.

Anyway, I should go scheme to get some secrets out of the it girls take a shower and do last-minute research on Florence and Milan. I should also eat and finish packing. I have been eating around 1-2 meals a day, mostly. I figured I should lose weight guess I had a lot of reserved fat before coming here because I am pretty sure I'm still quite healthy. :)

I will see you all relatively soon, but until then.....

XOXO,
Gossip Girl Sumin

Etis3n from Ghana!

Wow, has it really taken all summer for me to get my rear in gear and make a blog post? I'm sorry guys for staying out of touch, but please know that even though I haven't been writing, I've been an avid reader and I love your hilarious stories and awesome pictures. (The shark attack photos were particularly terrifying! :) And Zizz's skydiving photos were ACTUALLY terrifying - girl, you are so brave!!! WOW! And Ashley - your hats and other creations are awesome! Way to go girl! :) )  Its hard to be Queen of Partay when you have no Partay People, and being so far from home has been tough at times, but meu has been a great lifeline to the family. Thank you so much for keeping my spirits up, you are all wonderful.

I do want to mention that I actually have been maintaining a blog on my personal website since I came to Ghana. I neglected to send the site out to everyone, sorry! but here it is: http://ebenjami.scripts.mit.edu/home/?page_id=242

But no one should bother combing back through my posts from 2 months ago, so let me just give you some highlights of the craziest, hilarious-est shenanigans I've been in since I came to Ghana:

- Hanging out with kente cloth weavers in Kumasi.
- Getting hit on by Margarine Man, the factory worker in charge of putting the labels on the margarine tubs. His pickup line? [Voice of awe] "And these - are the original flavor labels!"
- Ordering my first legal alcoholic beverage on the beach in Accra (it was a Heineken).
- Riding tro-tros (aka bush taxis aka the craziest ride in a passenger van that you will ever have) all around town.
- Dancing azonto with some very drunk 40 year old women at a wedding! :) (And getting pwned, btw.)
- Getting sent, on my 3rd week at work, to the neighboring country of Burkina Faso where I used to live, to recruit university students at a career fair, acting as a translator for my anglophone boss, and even revisiting my old middle school and my old English teacher!
- Exploring the old slave castles around Jamestown.
- Going down into a gold mine in Obuasi.
- Getting a shirt tailor made from legit Ghanaian fabric, and bonding with the seamstresses who called me "sister-in-law" when they found out I was dating a Ghanaian.
- Taking the 6 hour bus ride from Kumasi to Accra in the most comfortable Chinese bus you'll ever sit in - until the shocks give out :)
- Making friends with the fruit vendors, sundries store owners and 9 year old bartenders (well, okay, there was only one of those) in my neighborhood.
- Ordering cocktails at half-price cocktail night in - get this - Ryan's Irish Pub in Accra!
- Crowding around the radio listening to the breaking news of the death of the former President John Atta Mills.
- Staying late at the office for countless evenings, mostly to rock out in the back office with the other Ghanaian interns to Janelle Monae and P!nk.

Now you're just dying to read all my old blog posts, right? :)

Anyway, its been a great experience being in Ghana. I have learned so much about who I am and what I want to do and be in my life than I could ever have imagined - I certainly wasn't expecting to figure this out in the middle of Ghana, of all places. Who would have known that eating banku at a roadside chop bar could give you deep insight into yourself? :)

This is my last week in Ghana - I'll be shipping up to Boston (waaa-aaa-aaa-oooh!) on Friday and arriving Saturday afternoon. I'm really excited to be setting up shop in IFQ - but Noah, what's this about calling our study room the Rumpus Room? I had a good laugh over that one when Adrienne told me, but can you do me a favor and keep it on the DL while my mom's in town? Otherwise she's gonna ship my butt straight back to McCormick. I only barely got out of there alive last time! :)

But please keep posting and letting us know how you're doing - its so much fun to read about your adventures! I miss you all so much and I cannot wait to see you all again. So for now, goodbye, and I hope you all have safe travels for the rest of the summer and that you come back to Boston relaxed and super excited for another year at MIT!!!

Zizz catching up

Hello dears!  I last posted at the end of June, so I've a decent amount of catching up to do.

"artsy" picture of one of our Mini-Mobility Bases (Mini-MoB)

At the beginning of June I posted about my internship and my summer project at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.  Re-reading that post, I didn't say much about my actual project, probably because I didn't know what it was going to be.  To give a quick summary: my team worked with the Flight Robotics Laboratory to develop a platform to simulate automated rendezvous and docking algorithms in a micro-friction environment.  The lab already uses two air-bearing vehicles which use pressurized air to float on the flat floor to simulate micro-friction, the smaller of which weighs 3000 lbs.  Since we want to simulate interactions with small satellites (80kg-ish), we needed smaller vehicles, so my team designed and developed a set of three smaller air-bearing vehicles, which we called the Mini-Mobility Bases.  If you're curious, here's a video of the finished product.  My team lead, Joaquin, is the camera man, and my teammate Dacen is spinning it around on the floor... and then attempting to surf on it. ;)

JPL mission ops room - that's where they controlled the MSL landing.

At the end of June I posted about our internship business trip to Kennedy Space Center in Florida.  In late July we went on a second business trip to California, where we toured NASA's JPL and Dryden Flight Research Center, SpaceX, Honeybee Robotics, Boeing Satellite Systems, and SOFIA.  SOFIA is a really bad-ass telescope because it's built into a modified Boeing 747 which flies at altitudes around 40000 ft and therefore can make observations sans most atmospheric distortion.

Left to right: Jenny, Me, Clare, Sera

My internship ended on August 3rd, and on August 4th I flew home.  On August 5th I had two long meetings to prepare for orchestra camp with my high school orchestra, and I spent August 7th-13th up at Interlochen Arts Academy being a PHS Orchestra Camp counselor.  This means I slept in a cabin with 12 high school girls, supervised students at meal times and cabin time, coached sectionals and chamber music, taught music theory, and played in the staff chamber ensemble.  We played a lovely suite by Dohnanyi and the kids did not fail to impress.  Picture: one day, Head Counselor Ben started a side-pony trend.

Sneak Preview of the rest of my summer: Seattle/Vancouver from the 14th to the 21st, campus on the 22nd, FPOP from the 23rd to the 26th, chill time till classes.

Love and miss you all!
Zizzie

Anna in the Wildernesses (Frat Boy City VA, Green Bank WV, Socorro NM)

Preview: I find a girl sleeping on my porch, have a bear encounter, image some merging galaxies, and climb on a radio dish.

-

Anna in Frat Boy City, Virginia

A couple of weeks ago, I finished Skyping Daniel at around 1:30am and decided to go to sleep. While changing into my pajamas, I noticed, with great sadness and distress, that there was a large insect on my ceiling. I watched it for a couple of minutes - it buzzed around the light, before finally overheating (I guess?) and taking a swan dive onto my bed. It crawled around for a bit. I dashed into the kitchen, grabbed a paper plate and a little Tupperware container, caught the bug, and shuffled over to the front door to release it into the wild. By this point, it was around 2:15 (I skipped the part of the story where my housemate was throwing up and I was running around the kitchen manufacturing a throw-up-bin for her.) I opened the door, released the bug, looked up, and came face-to-back-of-head with a girl who was fast asleep on our porch swing, about two feet in front of me.

Cue one of my most socially awkward five minutes, ever.

Me: Um...hi?
Girl: *snores*

I looked around desperately - no one. Nothing, except for the dulcet tones of a frat party happening a couple of blocks away. I figured that's probably where this girl had come from - the beer I could smell supported my hypothesis.

Me: Uh...HELLO!
Girl: *turns over*
Me: Hi. Excuse me? ...hello? ...HI! ...Um, hi, can I help you?
Girl: *snores*
Me: *poke*
Girl: *asleep*
Me: *poke* *poke*
Girl: *asleep*

I gave up and shook her. She stirred.

Girl: Mmmmm...
Me: Hi! Are you okay?
Girl: Yeaaaaah, yeaaaaah...
Me: ...Is there someone I can call for you?
Girl: Nooooooope (she had a vowel elongation problem)
Me: Um, well, I'd really like to call someone for you, since I'm worried about you.
Girl: I sweeeaaaaaar, I don't know where he got that alcohol
Me: .....
Girl: Heh, heh, we are SO fucked.
Me: Um. What? No, I don't think we are.
Girl: haaaaaaaaaaaa
Me: ...Can I call your parents?
Girl: Oh God, NOOOOOOOOO!!!!

Great. With that, I ran out of ideas, and the girl fell back asleep. It seemed like she was in less than ideal condition, and I didn't feel comfortable leaving her on the porch like that, alone - so I called the police. In a few minutes, a police car and a police van (seemed like overkill to me) showed up. Two very nice police officers came up onto the porch, shone a flashlight into the girl's eyes, and got her to sit up. In the end, they got her sober friends to come pick her up. In the meantime, I tried to explain to them what I had been doing out on the porch at 2am with a paper plate, in pajamas and flipflops. I waved the plate in the air and said that I had been rescuing an insect. They didn't look particularly convinced...

Anna in Green Bank, West Virginia

The best place for a radio telescope is The Middle Of Freaking Nowhere, to minimize interference (your cellphone, spark plug, digital camera = the bane of the radio astronomer's existence.) My data, for example, comes from a 110m dish called the Green Bank Telescope (GBT), in Green Bank WV.

Green Bank WV is in a National Dark Zone: you can't bring ANY electronics equipment into that area. Closer to the telescope itself, you can't even drive your car, because of the spark plug; they have a bunch of diesel engines sitting around. It's like a little diesel car graveyard. As you can imagine, you get an awesome view of the sky at night.

...as enticing as that may sound, the last thing any astronomer wants is to have to live at Green Bank. There is nothing to do there, except hike and consume large quantities of alcohol. So, when my friend Trey had to spend a week there, back in July, to point the GBT at some molecular clouds, his roommate Stephen and I decided to pay him a visit and deliver some hand-made truffles. We met up with my friend Kristin, who's working at Green Bank this summer (I can't even imagine what that would be like...) and the three of us were walking across the main site (by the dorms, offices, etc) when an animal bundled across the road and into a field to our right.

Me: ....What was that?
Kristin: A deer.
Me: I really don't think that was a deer.
Kristin: Eh, there are a billion deer around here
Me: That was WAY too big to be a deer.
*pause*
Me: I'm pretty sure that was a bear.
Stephen: It's possible.
Me: Are there bears here?
Kristin: Yeah...

*pickup truck drives over to us*
Man with AMAZINGLY STRONG SOUTHERN DRAWL: Hey, did y'all see that bear that just went by?
Me, Kristin, Stephen: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Me: YES
Man with PERSISTENTLY STRONG SOUTHERN DRAWL: Which direction did it go?
Me, Kristin, Stephen: *point*
Man with southern drawl who turns out to be a TOTAL BADASS: Okay, thanks.

He drove off after it. I guess this guy chases bears in a pickup truck. Welcome to West Virginia!

Anna in Socorro, New Mexico

Many of you know that I keep ending up in New Mexico, for a variety of completely unrelated reasons. The summer after my junior year of High School, I did a summer program hosted at New Mexico Tech (in Socorro) called the Summer Science Program. In a nutshell, we had class during the day, with an overarching project of observing and calculating the orbit of a near-earth asteroid. One of our field trips was to the Very Large Array of radio telescopes (hereafter referred to as the VLA) - I had no idea that I would use said telescopes three summers later for a real research project.

The summer after I graduated from High School, I worked at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque for seven weeks. I ended up spraining my ankle really badly during an Ultimate Frisbee incident; I spent the last four weeks of my New Mexico stay, and the first two weeks of my freshman year at MIT, on crutches. Even so, my host and I did a bunch of touristing around the state, including a day-long motorcycle trip (SO. MUCH. FUN.) A few pictures from the motorcycle adventure:

The takeaway: New Mexico is one of the most beautiful places on the planet. 

IAP of my freshman year, I spent four weeks on a Navajo reservation (about a two-hour drive from Albuquerque) with Teach For America. A few more New Mexico pictures, because I can't resist:

          

            

This summer, I'm based in Charlottesville, but working for the organization that operates the VLA. The summer students got time on the VLA to observe a galaxy merger (and two black holes, but I didn't work on that project). We took a field trip to New Mexico, to work with the summer students there on analyzing the data. We could resolve the two galaxies! It was so cool. We also found a mysterious extra flux source that wasn't in any database...we submitted another proposal, and will be taking another look soon. It would be cool if it were something new. Unfortunately, there's always the possibility that it's just some weird artifact of the way we processed the data. 

This time, when we toured the VLA, we toured as members of the NRAO, and were able to climb up onto the radio dishes and see the receivers.

I'm the one waving. The girl, that is.

The whole summer student crew :)

Hope you all are having awesome summers! I'll be back at LMF on August 26th - see some of you soon, hopefully?