I just flirtatiously touched some girl in the study lounge that I thought was you… Fuckkk

I saw a great movie this week: Up in the Air with George Clooney, who plays a “consultant” who travels year-round for his job, which is essentially firing people.  One of the supporting actresses in the flick plays a recent Cornell University (my alma mater!) graduate who is attempting to revolutionize the way the consultancy fires people (via remote web-cam interfaces, rather than local in-person offices, thereby saving traveling expenses). The protagonist of the film is clearly upset by this sudden change, and critiques the new-hire as inexperienced and oblivious to the personal nuances of the job.

The movie does not directly relate to business-schools, per se, but it does bring up the question of the value of business schools.  In [Due to] recent times, many articles have appeared in various publications critiquing the benefits of an MBA and the damage business schools have done to the economy.  Of course, many of these articles are not well researched, nor statistically proven — they seem more like an angry writer’s barrage of rants.  The most recent article was written The New Republic: http://bit.ly/4w5CtL.

These types of critiques are not entirely wrong, but they are misleading in that they over-generalize and over-simplify the basis for seeking an MBA, attacking the schools and the teaching methods behind it; they also often pin the students as greedy, destructive, selfish, and incompetent individuals.  These assumptions and generalizations are angering.  What is that one famous adage? Oh yes… walk a mile in another’s shoes.

If you’re new to the research of business-schools, please take these articles at face value and nothing more.  Read them with a grain of salt; do your own research; analyze your own life and your own goals; THEN draw your own conclusions from that research and self-reflection.

From my own intense research, I DID conclude that business schools prepare students to be profit-oriented managers.  Students who decide to pursue an MBA DO wish to and often do graduate with a job that pays higher than their pre-MBA job (as a matter of fact, many bankers and consultants cannot continue up their proverbial corporate ladder without an MBA). I also DID find that a lot of the recent demise on Wall Street could be blamed on those with an MBA.

What I also found, however, that led me to decide to attend business school is the following (not an extensive/exhaustive list).
a) business schools presents me with an invaluable resource: a strong business network for my future endeavors.
b) I will graduate with a strong brand name that will stand behind my reputation.
c) I will learn from my peers and grow in a way that will not happen on the job.
d) the time is right for me to go back for an education will set me up for career progression (expanding my family business in the future).

In any case, the movie was really interesting and profound, and I highly recommend seeing it.

During the last board meeting, I was informed that Cornell Cooperative Extension of Oneida County’s board decided to give their year end surplus to their employees in the form of a 2.5% bonus.  Keep in mind that Cornell is funded by taxpayers and Oneida County taxpayers in particularly.  The county funds many non-profits and other services.  You will hear many longtime legislators often yell about the small amount of discretionary spending they have to control.  With many non-profits receiving cuts to their funding over the past two years, I found this a little odd.  Especially considering that we have legislative representation on this board.  The legislator from the 10th district (Westmoreland), and also the county’s Republican Party Chairman, serves on Cornell’s board.  I asked him if this was true and he not only said it was, he said he advocated for this. 

My question was, if this is taxpayer money (your money), and we are in such financial trouble, why was it not considered that they simply return the surplus to the county?  Sounds logical enough to me. 

This board has long been controlled by the county Republicans.  Many have stated that it has acted as a dumping ground for board appointments and jobs for their allies.  I only bring up the party control to illustrate, again, that wasteful spending, big government and the treatment of your tax dollars as their own, has no party bias.  It happens on both sides.  The problem is the issue.  And in order to stop it, you need to be able to put a face on who allows it to happen.  You deserve to be informed.  Whether you care or not is your choice, but I still believe you have a right to be informed on what happens with your money.

graduate school life after Thanksgiving break has been pretty hectic.  since then, the following things happened:

• got into my favourite lab, working on an interesting project!
• finished exams, all of them
• discovered how awesome department holiday parties are
• arrived home just before the 20-inch snowstorm
• crazy last minute christmas shopping
• received my grades (did a LOT better than i thought!)

i can’t wait to start working in the lab next semester!  but having this brief period of reprieve from work is quite nice, though I must say, without work taking up a majority of my day, i’m not quite sure what to do with my time…

Neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, not gloom of night shall keep me from my appointed interviews! Borrowing that from the USPS, I figured that was a pretty good recap of my weekend. Friday night, Danielle and I had dinner with friends and we didn’t get back until pretty late. We slept in until about 9ish on Saturday, which was a welcome relief from the stresses of the past week. The original plan was to drive up to Ithaca on Sunday and stay at the Statler hotel, which is a hotel on Cornell’s campus that is student run. The only problem was the huge freaking blizzard that was scheduled to hit the northeast on Saturday. I didn’t think much of it at first until I spoke with my mother (who lives near Philly) who informed me that 8 inches of snow had just fallen in the first hour of the storm. It was right about that time that I panicked…

My fiancée and I started running around the apartment packing everything for the weekend. It was about 11:30 and the storm was supposed to hit NYC around 1, so there wasn’t much time to waste. I quickly called and booked a room at the Courtyard Marriott Ithaca, for the night (because I didn’t really want to pay another $250 to stay at the Statler for an additional night). We made great time up to Ithaca and didn’t see a drop of snow. The trip had started very well…

We found a local bar to eat at called “The Rose” and had a pretty good meal, with the locals seeming very friendly. It was pretty cold at night, so we didn’t hang around for very long. We made our way back to hotel and went to bed.

Sunday brought another day. We wanted to explore a little, so we went to an early movie to see Avatar (in 3D). I highly, highly recommend this to anyone who might want to see it. The theater in Ithaca was pretty spectacular. We only paid $11/person for a 3D movie. I am used to paying that for a normal Saturday movie in NYC…pretty good snack choices as well.

We then went to check into the Statler hotel. It is a beautiful hotel and they gave us a room with a view of the valley that is below Cornell. The campus is very much an IVY league campus, with brick and old stone throughout the buildings. We settled in and watched some football. After watching the Jets choke their game away, we went to the hotel restaurant. It was a very nice Italian place with a nice view of campus. After dinner we settled back into our hotel room and I tried to get some sleep before the big day…

It was no use, 10 o’clock turned into 11, into 12…I finally fell asleep around 12:30, only to wake up at 2:30! After some restlessness, I went back to bed around 3:30 and woke up at 7, so not terrible, but not a great night’s sleep either. I got up, ordered some breakfast and got dressed for my interview.

I arrived at around 8:50 for my 9:15 interview and waited in the admissions office until my interviewer arrived. I was supposed to be interviewing with an adcom, but was told that she would be joined by a 2nd year student. I didn’t know if this was good or bad, but I had to just roll with the punches. The 2nd year student arrived (along with the adcom) around 9:20 and after introductions, we made our way to a conference room.

The 2nd year told that this was going to be very conversational and that he would be conducting the interview under the supervision of the adcom. He started by telling me about himself and about his time at Johnson. Then we started the interview. Here are the questions that he asked, I don’t think you are going to find them as helpful because he tailored the interview to my work experience and the flow of our discussion.

Tell me why you chose your college.

Tell me about your internship at Bear Stearns.

Anything you saw that made you not surprised that it went out of business?

Tell me what ICAP (current company) is and what you do.

What 3 changes need to be made to fix the financial system?

Do you like the VaR model?

What is its main drawback?

What other schools are you applying to and why?

What is the main difference between Tuck and Johnson in your eyes?

Tell me how your teammates would describe you as a team member? (work and ex. curricular)

Asked me a long hypothetical question about morals and wanted me to detail my thought process for him.

Any questions for me?

The interview lasted for almost an hour and after that time I was escorted back to the admissions office. After that I met with Randall Sawyer, the assistant dean of admissions. We chatted about life in Ithaca and what having a partner there would mean. It was a really nice talk and it really helped with some of my concerns.The only bad part about the conversation was Randall telling me that I would still have to wait until Feb 15th to hear anything back. I had hoped that it would be rolling instead of a deadline…

With the interview and my interaction with some of the students, Johnson has zoomed past Stern to #1 on my list (of 2). I really loved the scenery of Ithaca and the small town feel. I think it would be the perfect place to spend 2 years and I am really hoping that I get some good news in February!

I hope everyone had a great weekend and that your R2 apps are coming along nicely.

People have told me that tenure is an anti-climactic event, and frankly it’s true. I just spoke with the Dean today who told me the committee enthusiastically supported tenure (yea, yea, yea, it’s not final until the Board meets in February but I’d have to rob a local liquor store to get turned down if the committee and the dean votes in my favor). Yes, I’m thrilled, but it also feels like a long way around to a conclusion I never really doubted. Hmmm…

It’s rare, however, that a variety of decisions all come together at the same time. The tenure committee meets throughout the year to make reappointment, tenure, and promotion decisions. Its just a quirk of the schedule that my meeting fell this week which coincides with sabbatical decisions and decisions for funding. I got word on all three today: yes on tenure, yes on sabbatical, yes on funding. Woo-hoo! I will be a Campbell McConnell Fellow for the next year which will allow me a variety of travel funding for my half-year sabbatical. When I spoke with the Dean, though, he also offered me the position of director of Cornell’s “wilderness field term” in northern Minnesota, a program that takes students into the Boundary Waters. With a half year sabbatical, I would normally teach three courses in the fall, but the director position allows me a two course release (and one course release for the next two years), so I will only be teaching one course next year. In Cornell’s “One-Course-At-A-Time” schedule, this means that I will only be teaching in November next year. I will travel to the Minnesota field station in September, travel elsewhere in October, teach in November, and for all practical purposes begin my sabbatical in December.

I have a variety of projects I am working on for my sabbatical, most notably applying for “artist-in-residence” programs at a variety of national parks to work on a series of essays about our relationships with landscape. But another new and intriguing project I’m working on is with the relatively new non-profit “Act and Empower” which is working to help the Batwa peoples of Uganda. I am hoping to travel to Uganda over the next year to record a variety of their folk tales and have them translated and collected into a book. This would not only be a way to highlight the dire situation of the Batwa (and bring awareness to the important work that Act and Empower is doing and hopefully raise some money for the organization), but it will also  serve as a way to preserve some of this culture that is at immanent risk of being lost because of their displacement. This is a very new arena of work for me, but I’m excited to get this project rolling. I feel honored that Cornell has agreed to help me in this venture.

It’s exciting how much has been determined very quickly. I can see the next few years much more clearly now than I could a few weeks ago. So tonight definitely called for a special beer and I tapped into the Lost Abbey supply that I’d been saving for a worthy occasion. MB has a busy few days still, then we can settle back in to what will supposedly be a good Christmas ice/snow storm for a few days, drink some nice wine, eat some good food, and celebrate.

‘Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known’
Carl Sagan In Memoriam

Stone circle and midwinter sunset light

Neolithic farming communities in Scotland between the 56th and 57th parallel dragged massive 50-ton blocks of stone over the snow to form windows on the sky.

Recumbent stone circle at winter solstice

Fire festivals reenacted fire of the dying sun in stone circles

It must have seemed like a miracle at solar standstill when, after disappearing for seventeen hours, the sunlight returned and days began to lengthen once more. Seventeen hours of darkness is a long time if you live in a cave, an earth dugout or a stone mound.

The human subconscious appears to retain partial memory of this primordial condition which animals have, because in northern latitudes midwinter is often celebrated to an irrational degree. It is as if at a cellular level we remember that after galactic stillpoint is reached, the Earth starts to awaken once more and we realize that the Universe is going to keep on turning. What a blessing. What a miracle. What better reason to rejoice?

It is said our biological form is quintessentially-adapted for language: that the Word has created in our brain’s motor centers a highly developed auditory discrimination, with rapid muscular response in tongue, lips and palate; but we were not its makers. It was a gift from Creation which we have evolved to a remarkable sophistry. Fire, on the other hand was Man’s ultimate discovery.

At the forty-fifth parallel of latitude, in the cave vaults of Choukoutien near Beijing, a heavy-browed paleoanthropic form of Man with a cranial capacity as low as 860cc gnawed marrow bones and chipped stone implements. His time lies 500,000 years remote from this and yet in those years of the second Ice Age, this Man, with scarcely two-thirds of our modern cranial capacity, used fire.

Is it any wonder, then, that world mythology is filled with tales of sorcerer-priests who conjure light, the hero-giant stealer of fire from the gods? In discovering fire, were we not amazed at our ability to do as the gods themselves, to create Light?

In that dark cave half a million years ago ‘Peking Man’ created a spark which dispelled the darkness. His was the crucible which contained our entire human future. Have we not ever since – at a cellular level – been searching to return to that same realm of Light?

Round Zodiac of Dendera, from 50BC during Roman rule of Upper Egypt

In Babylonian legend, the redeemer of the world, Celestial Man, is expected to rise from the heart of the (cosmic) Ocean.

Ancient Man looked to the heavens for inspiration. Medieval Man was convinced heaven was right out there among the stars. It is only we, modern homo (so-called) sapiens who forgets to do that kind of communing with the Universe.

On the other hand select niches in our society still seek: within the scientific establishment the search for extra-terrestrial life (SETI) continues apace. Carl Sagan, exobiologist, astronomer and visionary, along with his colleagues at Cornell, created a fashion in the early ’70s for that kind of exploration.

He said:

‘We are starfolk, but we live in the galactic boondocks where the action isn’t’

and took steps, aided by NASA, to communicate with any advanced civilizations out there which might deign to reply. In sending the Pioneer 10’s message plaque of gold-plated aluminum to a star region in the vicinity of Taurus/Orion, they hoped to trigger a response from any listening/receiving civilization.

Pioneer 10 gold-plated plaque continues to travel for 80,000 years

Shortly after launching interstellar spacecraft Pioneer in March 1972, SETI directed efforts to beaming radio telescope transmissions to the stars. The latest of these was sent from Arecibo, Puerto Rico towards the Vega-Altair-Deneb triangle in 1999. By that time radio frequency was a speedier means of transmission than the fuel-propelled Pioneer space vehicle where a destination of even the nearest star (four light years distant) would not be reached for 80,000 years.

Besides they reasoned that if any civilizations were listening in/eavesdropping on us the Arecibo message was joining a century of transmissions from our planet, starting with Marconi’s first wireless communication in 1897.

It is thirteen years since Carl Sagan’s premature death on winter solstice 1996. He would be intrigued to learn of the massing body of evidence in favour of extra-terrestrial communication. The crop circle archive alone is superb. Not only does it communicate in the languages of science he advocated (mathematics, physics, astronomy), but, based on his premise that a more advanced civilization would find a more sophisticated means of communicating with us than we had with them, their graphics succeed in touching us at a cellular and emotional level, as well as pointing us to the stars.

Ancient World religions like the Judaic, Arabic, Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek and Vedic faiths have frequent admonitions to look to the stars, to ‘observe in the east’, to watch the heavens for signs.

Our society is on the cusp of the year 2010. We have a Space Station partially operational; Hubble and SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) are in orbit; CERN has just collided atoms at an unprecedented rate in the tunnels below Geneva in Switzerland. We are technically advanced.

What about our spirit?

Neale Donald Walsch says:

Individuals — if their thought (prayer, hope, wish, dream, fear) is amazingly strong — can, in and of themselves, produce such results. Jesus did this regularly. He understood how to manipulate energy and matter, how to rearrange it, how to redistribute it, how to utterly control it. Many Masters have known this. Many know it now.
Neale Donald Walsch Conversations with God

If our heads were not so clouded by traffic jams and mind jams and living in a race for security and success, we might pause for this moment of solstice – the last in a single digit year for a century – and look to the heavens with awe. Two of our neighbours in the solar system, the crescent moon and Jupiter, shine brilliantly together shortly after sunset in the night sky. We have just experienced a multi-colour array of Geminid meteors emanating from the constellation which follows Orion through the night, with our brightest star, Sirius, stella maris, hovering below. It is the season for aurora borealis, which has already peaked over the Canadian Arctic. These are ‘commonplace’ wonders. However, we have also been treated to some unusual cosmic ’signs’.

Spiral of light over Tromsö, Norway on eve of Obama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance

Great Eye of Sauron in Fomalhaut

‘We ask you once again to keep your eyes on the skies. These are the days when the signs have become talking points, that will awaken people’s awareness, not just to our presence but our methods of contact with you. For many years we have made crop circles as one means of getting your attention. As you will have noticed in more recent times, they have become more sophisticated. The messages they send have been interpreted, and their symbolism correctly understood. They have carried energy with them, and even although everyone has not understood them, it has connected with them sub-consciously.’

If Carl Sagan were still with us, I think he might consider this form of transmission equally valid from an advanced stellar civilization. After all his criteria suggested that those who had survived a post-nuclear age without exterminating either themselves or their habitat would be in a better frame of consciousness to extend the vibration of ascension and assistance to help another up the ladder of evolution.

If you’re listening, Carl. We miss you. Happy Solstice.

I’m currently an Operations Research and Information Engineering (ORIE) M.Eng student at Cornell University. Before I forget everything, here’s a recap of the courses that I took this semester. Maybe this will also be useful to people who are considering the program.

1. ORIE5340 (Heuristic Methods for Optimization, 3 credits) taught by Professor Shoemaker – I took this course because the subject matter sounded interesting to me, specifically, genetic algorithms. Main topics in the course were greedy search, simulated annealing, Tabu search, genetic algorithms, genetic programming / symbolic regression, algorithm comparison, and some methods from the professor’s own research. Homework assignments generally consisted of implementing specific algorithms in MATLAB and analyzing output / performance. Despite disorganized lectures and lecture notes filled with typos, I felt I achieved my goals in taking the course, which were to understand and learn how to apply all these algorithms to practical problems.

Workload: 2 (on scale of 1-5)
Difficulty: 2

2. ORIE5500 (Engineering Probability and Statistics II, 4 credits) taught by Professor Samorodnitsky - This was a required course for the program. The split was roughly 2/3 probability and 1/3 statistics. Overall, a good refresher on some things that I already knew and a solid introduction to statistics. Lectures were clear and organized.

Workload: 3
Difficulty: 3

3. ORIE5580 (Simulation Modeling and Analysis, 2 credits) taught by Professor Topaloglu – This was another required course for the program. I was able to waive out of the first half based on previous coursework. The second half consisted mainly of an introduction to discrete event simulation using ProModel software. Additionally, we covered variance reduction using common random numbers and antithetic variables. The course culminated in a project which was basically a mini case study that required building a model in ProModel and analyzing results. I felt the project was not much more than a glorified homework problem and could have been much better if even a slight bit of creativity was involved. Another gripe I had was the choice of ProModel as the vehicle for teaching discrete event simulation. I feel ProModel is nice for non-programmers (GUI interface, point and click to do stuff, minimal code), but inflexible and awkward for building more complex systems. To be fair, if say, MATLAB was a prerequisite, the course would probably be a lot less accessible to the student body. Despite the course’s shortcomings, Professor Topaloglu was a very engaging lecturer and tried hard to make students understand.

Workload: 3 (2, if not for the long, boring project)
Difficulty: 1

4. ORIE5600 (Financial Engineering with Stochastic Calculus I, 4 credits) taught by Professor Wissel – My goal for this course was to understand stochastic calculus well enough so that if I ever want to work at a hedge fund or on Wall Street, I would have a basic foundation of the quantitative side of things. We covered chapters 1-5 of Steven Shreve’s Stochastic Calculus for Finance II. The subject matter was a bit intimidating at first, and I thought it would turn into more of a proof-based math course. However, only the absolutely essential parts of measure theory were established before moving on to new concepts (following the philosophy of Shreve’s book). Lectures were decent, although I missed quite a few due to the 8:40am start time. Due to a post-midterm bout with lack-of-motivationitis, I slacked off quite a bit during the second half of the course, but was able to catch up before finals, so overall, I achieved my goal for the class.

Workload: 3 (HWs were fairly time consuming, but only had 6)
Difficulty: 4

5. ORIE6500 (Applied Stochastic Processes, 4 credits) taught by Professor Samorodnitsky – Yes, I took two courses with the same professor who probably thought it highly unusual that someone would take his undergraduate-level probability & statistics class and his PhD-level stochastic processes course concurrently. I enrolled in this course because I wanted exposure to some PhD-level material while knocking out a required introduction to stochastic processes course for spring semester. We used Adventures in Stochastic Processes by Resnick and covered generating functions, Markov chains, martingales, renewal theory, and continuous-time Markov chains. This class was my hardest course, and the homeworks were brutal. I was a bit lost in all the theory and proofs, but still feel I learned a lot. For example, reading a book like Ross’s Probability Models has become a breeze, a far cry from my undergraduate days.

Workload: 5 (a dreadful homework every week)
Difficulty: 5

6. MATH4130 (Honors Analysis, 4 credits) taught by Professor Nerode – My goal for the class was to attain a solid background in real analysis if I ever chose to pursue a PhD. We covered up to sequences of functions in  The Way of Analysis by Strichartz. Professor Nerode is obviously a brilliant guy (google him), but I don’t think I learned a single thing from his lectures. The textbook, paired with other texts including Abbott’s Understanding Analysis and Rudin’s classic book were adequate, so by doing the homeworks, I was able to learn the material.

Workload: 3
Difficulty: 3

7. ORIE5110 (Case Studies, 1 credit) taught by Professor Caggiano – A 1-credit short course (6 weeks) in which we completed a case study on job-shop scheduling and presented our results. I was paired up with a great team and ended up coding a non-trivial C# application that I spent way too much time on. The project itself was relatively interesting and allowed a lot of room for creativity.

Workload: 5 (very intense, was spending 2 hours on it every day)
Difficulty: 3

8. ORIE9100 (Enterprise Engineering Colloquium, 1 credit) – These were a series of a talks given by notable Cornell alumni who ranged from serial entrepreneurs to Wall Street veterans. Overall, a good experience that only required showing up every week for an hour.

9. ORIE5980 (Applied OR Project, 1 credit) - This 2-semester long project which doesn’t really start until the second semester takes the place of a Master’s Thesis in the M.Eng program. Project assignments are received in November, and a written proposal is due before the semester ends. I received my first choice, which is a project regarding quantifying different aspects of Microsoft’s Software Assurance Benefits Program. So far, it seems like an exercise in data mining a large data set, but I will post more on this later. My group and I spent a bit of time during dead week before finals writing the proposal, which left me scrambling to make up for lost time. Nevertheless, I think this will be a fun and rewarding experience.

Conclusion: Phew! That took a while to write up and reminded me what a busy semester it has been. I completed a total of 24 credits this semester, which is a lot since only 30 credits are required to graduate. With that said, my GPA will probably be between 3.5 and 3.6, which is ok, but not great and was a result of me cutting corners on some classes due to lack of time / discipline. Regardless, I think this has been a good semester. In the past, I have been notoriously bad at finishing things that I start, and this time around, I think I exerted even amounts of effort throughout the entire semester. For example, I took notes in an old notebook from my Freshman year undergraduate physics course (the original set of notes abruptly end after several weeks of lectures) and filled that one up from front to cover. I also completely used up a Chapstick and several pens. Baby steps…

- Letter to the Editor, Wisconsin State Journal,  December 18, 2009 -

 The Associated Press article by Ryan Foley printed in the 12/17/09 WSJ entitled “Just good fun or anti-Semitic?” described how the local college student majority, called sconnies, might be offending the out-of-state coasties. I suggest there are other possible labels of this behavior, including harmful and criminal. By making light of the “Coastie Song” and its mentality, there is a danger of perpetuating a limiting and hateful prejudice. I offer two examples.

As my spouse was recruited to work in Madison, we visited for a week of evaluation and exploration. Part of our decision was based on finding a nice church, so we went to several services. At one, while socializing afterwards, I was told I was dressed badly for their community – I should wear different clothes if we wanted to feel comfortable and welcomed. I believed the person was sharing their concern (well, chauvinism) to be helpful. I didn’t hear or understand all the words – thanks to the article, I now recognize the term “coastie”.

In a job interview in Madison, I was sharing how research I’d done during college would likely be beneficial to the hiring team. One of the interviewers responded by saying that studies and work at my Ivy League school would probably not be actually relevant and would certainly not be perceived as valuable and suggested I re-prioritize my schooling for my Madison job-search to be successful. I am confident that the interviewers were truly not trying to be offensive or mean – in fact, I believe they assumed they were being honest and helpful.

Is the article attempting irony in its portrayal of this demeaning treatment of those from outside, or without “the Wisconsin idea”, as issues of amenities, linguistics or touchiness?

The terms and associated treatments of class and state chauvinism are pejorative, demeaning and hurtful – as much to the coasties as to the sconnies. Welcome to the global village.

I seem to be on a harbour kick this week, but they keep cropping up in my news feeds so they are what I’ve been thinking about. Or as Levi-Strauss would have said, they’re “good to think with.” Because harbours are interesting places. It’s where the water meets the land, a threshold where ships of war and trade dock, where people from different places interact. One of my professors, Dr. Christopher Monroe, a Senior Lecturer at Cornell University, has recently been spending a lot of time thinking about the liminality of harbors and how that liminality can be approached using nautical/maritime/underwater archaeology. His enthusiasm is infectious, and I too have found myself seeing liminality everywhere.

There was a lot of news today on a subject directly related to this: the lifting of a 9-ton red granite slab from the its resting place on the seabed in the harbour at Alexandria. This particular massive block of stone is believed to have come from a temple built by Cleopatra VII (that would be the Cleopatra, the one who ousted her brother, fooled around with Caesar, and then backed the wrong horse with Marc Antony). Archaeological work has been going on in the harbour since 1994, but nothing has been removed from the water since 2002. This was for good reason: the Egyptian archaeological authorities simply didn’t have the resources to deal with the conservation of artifacts and architecture from an underwater excavation.

The BBC reported that it was because the removal might damage them, which is only sort of true. The actual process of removal, like any excavation, is unlikely to damage the items if done with care. It’s really what happens afterwards thats the problem. The Associated Press article correctly reports that the salt in the seawater is the cause for concern, but in an impressive misunderstanding of science, they claim that when the object is in the water the salt acts as a preservative. This really isn’t true. Salt actually has very little effect on most types of material while they are submerged in seawater, except for the indirect effect it has on the how much oxygen there is present in said seawater. An ancient ship sunk in freshwater can be just as well-preserved as one in salt water. But, likewise, the salt doesn’t do any harm.

Think about it: when you dissolve a spoonful of salt in a glass of water it “dissolves,” and vanishes. What’s really happening is that “salt”, i.e. sodium chloride, is what in chemistry is also called a “salt,” which is an ionic compound resulting from a neutralization reaction of acids and bases. In the case of Sodium Chloride (NaCl), or table salt, one atom of sodium, with a single positive charge (Na+), is neutralized by a single atom of chlorine, with a single negative charge (Cl-). When in solution (i.e. dissolved in water), the sodium and chlorine ions interact with the water (H2O) which actually exists in a partially ionized state itself (H+ and OH-). Basically, all the ions are floating around together, neutralized, stable, and happy. But when the water is removed, say for example by evaporation, the sodium and chlorine ions are left on their own, and in a panicked effort to stabilize themselves they link up, and they happen to link up in an orderly fashion, which is what produces crystals. This orderly crystalline structure that the ions aline themselves in is sort of like an open-lattice, so it also takes up way more room in crystalline form than it did when it was just a bunch of little individual ions.

This whole process isn’t so much of a problem when it happens on the surface of something. When you go to the beach and go swimming and then fall asleep in the sun, you just wake up with a thin layer of salt crystals all over your body, which you can just brush off with a towel. But when an object is porous and all the water evaporates from inside it, the salt will crystallize wherever it happens to be and that includes inside the porous object. And in reality, just about everything is porous if you leave it sitting in water for several hundred years. Even granite. And when those ions form up into their surprisingly strong lattice crystalline structure, where they take up way more room than they used to, the resultant salt crystals will push on and possibly even break apart the material that they’re forming inside. Even granite.

So what this means is that if you were to pull an object out of the sea that’s been saturated with saltwater, say a giant slab from the pylon of Cleopatra VII, and then just let it sit in the sun to dry out, little salt crystals would form all over the inside of the stone, and it could quite possibly crumble into a heap of dust. This would be why the Egyptian government didn’t want people pulling things out of the harbour at Alexandria. Fortunately there is a reasonably simple solution to this problem. If you take the object that has been saturated in seawater and soak it for several months in rotating baths of fresh water, the salt can be leached out of the object until it is sufficiently desalinated and safe to allow it to dry. Such will be the fate of this carved granite block, which took three days to drag to safety away from the shipping lanes and close enough to shore for a crane to pull it out of the sea, only to be put back into a giant tank of water.

So, what does this have to do with liminality? The word “liminal” comes from the Latin, limen, meaning “threshold” or “doorway”, and in the early 20th century entered anthropological discourse in Arnold Van Gennep’s seminal work, Les rites de passages. In this work liminality is presented as the second of the three stages a person passes through in a rite of passage: Preliminary (separation), Liminal (transition), and Postliminary (reintegration). The liminal phase is characterized by ambiguity and paradox, during which the participant exists simultaneously to both the preliminary and postliminary states and to neither.

This is a great metaphor to consider a harbour with. A harbour is the physical embodiment of a doorway or threshold for a city or civilization. The ships and people who pass through it belong both to their home ports and to those that they visit, while also having no home at all. The harbour is of the sea and of the land, but is also its own thing, and the harbour at Alexandria is no exception.

Berth for the world’s great fleets, former site of mighty palaces and temples, crossroads of the Mediterranean, center of trade, war, and knowledge, the harbour has seen history pass, and it now holds in its depths the remains of that history, the detritus of history trapped in its own liminal state, having both passed out of time and memory, but also preserved, not truly allowed to fade. And this one block (9 tons of carved red granite), of this temple (to the goddess Isis), built by this queen (Cleopatra, perhaps history’s most famous), has finally escaped its liminal state in the murky depths of the harbour…

…only to enter another liminal state, stuck in a tank of fresh water in a conservation lab, thanks to being submerged in salt water for 2000 years. Thankfully, this one should be a lot briefer.

Links:
BBC News – Egypt lifts huge ‘Cleopatra temple’ block from sea
Monument lifted from Cleopatra’s underwater city

So, pardon the extraordinarily long break. Finals and research brought much of my outside life to a screeching halt, so this blog had to take a backseat for a couple of weeks. Oddly enough, site statistics didn’t really go down a significant amount, which probably says something about the consistent use of the historical info on this blog.

Anyways, during my holiday shopping, I happened upon a new little book that I felt the need to add to my collection. The book, Surrounded by Reality: 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Ithaca, NY (But Are About to Find Out) by Michael Turback, is a nice little book detailing some of the history and sights of the area. Some of the book entries share the same information that has previously been shared on this blog, but there was some new information to be garnered from its pages.

A lot of the book focuses on Cornell. Things that a lot of Cornellians already knew about the founder and A.D. White, but also some more obscure details. For example, a real description of Zinck’s. Theodore Zinck ran the “Lager Beer Saloon and Restaurant” out of the Hotel Brunswick at 108-110 N. Aurora (just off the current-day Commons) starting in 1880. Contrary to modern day bar-hopping, Zincl, while described as being a fatherly and caring figure who treated his customers with “Prussian high-handedness”. Customers could be thrown out of his bar, however, for drunkenness, bawdy songs, or derogatory references to the German Kaiser. The first Zinck’s operated until about 1903. That year, a typhoid epidemic rages through the city and claimed 85 lives, including Theodore Zinck’s daughter. Despondent, he drowned himself, effectively shutting down Zinck’s first incarnation. The bar reopened under his name in 1906 (which would be incredibly tasteless if he wasn’t regarded so affectionately), and continued in operation in some form in different names and places up to about 1967. Although, with the coming of the new Hotel Ithaca, it appears we may continue the local tradition of naming revered watering holes after a suicidal barkeep.

Another detail that the book referenced was the freezing over of Cayuga Lake. Cayuga Lake is about 435 feet deep, so usually the massive heat storage of the water keeps the lake from completely freezing over during the winter. However, that isn’t to say it can’t happen. Since 1796, the lake has frozen over about ten times (1796, 1816, 1856, 1875, 1884, 1904, 1912, 1934, 1961 and 1979). Wells College are small and formerly all-female school located further up the lakeshore in Aurora, has a school tradition where if the lake is discovered to be frozen over, classes are cancelled for the day (there is no such tradition for IC or Cornell). According to the book, during the 1875 freeze one athletic young woman at Wells decided to celebrate the day off by skating down the lake and back. Not too shabby, once you consider that the lake is just under 40 miles long.

One last one for the road; most Cornellians are well aware of the legend that if a virgin crosses the Arts Quad at midnight, Ezra and A.D. White will step off their pedestals and shake hands in the center of the quad. Wll, as it turns out, Ithaca College has their won virginity legend. Outside of Ithaca College’s Textor Hall stands a 10-foot high ball sculpture mounted over a small pool of water. Their campus legend states that if a virgin ever graduates from IC, the “Textor Ball” will fall off its pedestal and roll down South Hill. According to Wikipedia, Ithaca College has 49,570 alumni, and I’m willing to bet most of them are from after the school’s 1960s expansion and relocation.

Possibly the prettiest nut. I felt bad eating it…

Obviously not that bad.

Pistachios contain just 1.5 grams of saturated fat and 13 grams of fat – the majority of which comes from monounsaturated fat. A one-ounce serving of pistachios equals 49 nuts – more per serving than any other snack nut. One serving of pistachios has as much potassium as half a large banana. I’ve been snacking on them like crazy!

While snacking, my eyes feasted upon some glorious snail mail-

Cornell. My goal. My future (hopefully!)

Say a little prayer for me everyday. Your support will get me in

Today’s lunch consisted of the usual carrots and cucumber, apple and heart thrive. Apricot, to be more specific. I’ve been enjoying these all week as a component of my lunch (which never sees much variety)… this flavor was tasty, but with all my might, I couldn’t catch that apricot flavor I so desperately yearned for. I did, however, taste the almond extract within the first bite. Even though it was the last ingredient, its taste was definitely the most dominating. No complaining though, I thoroughly enjoyed it in US History when my tummy started to make noises.

Last night’s supper for the family:

Edamame Alfredo

Atop the daily bed of spinach lay whole wheat linguine and Alfredo sauce made with broccoli, celery, onion, and edamame. I used Simply Organic’s Alfredo sauce packet and subbed just milk and a dab of butter for vegetable broth and a dash of milk. I was worried the broth would leave the sauce a little runny, but my worries were put to rest upon first bite.

Twas tasty.

I hope everyone had themselves a Thrilling Thursday–deep down inside, we’re all wishing we could kick it with the ‘Crazy 88s’ like Uma Thurman does.

Apologies to OAR for completely stealing their song title, but I though it the best possible title to my post this morning.

I am hitting a whirlwind time in the application/decision process of applying for my MBA. Riding into work on the train this morning, I couldn’t help but relate my upcoming slate to a game of Texas hold-em. It might be a bit of a stretch, but follow me on this one…My hand has already been dealt. It was dealt long ago, in college (GPA) and with my GMAT score. To be honest it is probably a middling hand, at best. Am I the best candidate ever? No, but I think I am competitive at the schools to which I am applying. So lets say that I am currently holding a Q-10 off-suit. Not the best hand, but not the worst hand ever. It is a hand that is easy to play, but difficult to win with. Some have higher cards than I do, some people at the table are suited up, other lucked out with a pair to start.

Since I applied to only 3 schools I see it breaking down like this.

The Flop: Dartmouth – it doesn’t break my hand if I don’t get in, but it would certainly be a crappy start (I find out Friday at 5:00pm EST). I would need some luck with only two “cards” left to flip. On the other hand, Dartmouth could certainly make my hand if I flipped a set, or even (dream scenario) a full house. An inside straight draw would be the equivalent of the waiting list, as it is good enough of a hand to stick around, but you are going to need a lot of luck to pull that one out.

The Turn: My interview/decision from Cornell (Monday the 21st). This is my best chance at making a hand for myself. If I am still looking at rags after this card, it might be next to impossible to win the hand.

The River: NYU interview invite/decision. The last hope…If I am floating down the river at this point, I sure hope it is with a paddle. People have been known to “suck-out” on the river, but it doesn’t happen very often. When it does happen though, the relief/joy can not be compared to any other joy experienced during the game.

My cards are on the table, how about you? Shuffle up and deal!

Cornell University has a world-famous dendrochronology lab. Well, world-famous to people who keep tabs on things like dendrochronology labs. My advisor, Prof. Sturt Manning, is the director of the lab and after I took his dendro course at Cornell, I spent a semester working in the lab for some extra money. One of these days I’m sure I’ll write a post about all of the very cool things that you can do with dendro. Because they are VERY cool. But this post is going to be about dendro samples. Specifically the samples from a site known to the Cornell dendro lab as YNK, or Yenikapi.

The problem with being a grunt in the dendro lab is that you get to work on the material that no one else wants to. When I worked in the lab the post-docs and full-time researchers all had their own personal projects, and the students in the dendro course were given some choice in what kind of material to work on for their final projects. This left for the techs the samples that were hard to work with, boring (there are only so many cedar cores you can read from Cyprus before you want to gouge your eyes out), or… the wood from Yenikapi.

For the past three years the lab at Cornell has been flooded with samples from Yenikapi. The lab techs don’t get told too much about the samples that they are working on. Its just another piece of wood that has to be prepped appropriately, stuck underneath a microscope, and have each of its rings read and recorded in the computer to the precision of 1/100,000th of a meter. That’s 100ths of a millimeter. But even when we didn’t know what Yenikapi meant, me knew what having to work on Yenikapi meant.

See, there are four main kinds of wood that come into a dendro lab. First are your samples from living or recently deceased trees. Theses are cores or slices, usually in really good condition, that just need to be mounted and then sanded to a beautiful mirror finish before they can be read. Second are cores or slices taken from older decease trees… these might come from the wood used in a historical building or from an artifact like a piece of furniture, a coffin, or even the wood panel backing to a Rembrandt. Likewise these must be mounted and sanded, but often the wood isn’t in as good condition and the samples can be smaller and more fragile. The third and fourth categories of samples are the types found in archaeological or paleontological contexts, as they are ancient wood that has been somehow preserved. The third category is burnt wood, or charcoal, as once the wood has been reduced to carbon it usually doesn’t decay any further, unless it is damaged by water or impact (microscopic flakes of burnt wood can’t have the rings read!). The charcoal is wrapped with cotton string and masking tape to stabilize it, and then a clean surface is prepared for reading with a razor blade. The fourth and final category of sample is wet wood. Yenikapi is wet wood.

You see, when wood or other organic material is submersed in water it doesn’t decay the same way it would on land, as there is no oxygen present. However, wood usually isn’t submersed in perfectly clear distilled water, and the salt, other chemicals, and biological agents found in the water have a definite effect. This is why sunken ships and old piers last so long, even for thousands of years, but not forever. The wood becomes dark and discolored, the structure of the wood becomes completely saturated and spongy, and finally it does eventually disintegrate. It can also be pretty gross. To get a smooth surface that allows the rings to be read, the sharpest razor blades must be used, and even they can often only make two or three cuts before they become too dull, and instead of shaving the surface of the delicate sample, you smoosh it into unrecognizable goo or fluff it into a cashmere sweater. The frustration of prepping wet wood must be experienced to be truly appreciated, and takes a remarkable amount of patience, which I really didn’t possess. There was lots of swearing involved. Thank god they put that lab in the basement and the prep room behind its own heavy door.

Additionally, wet wood samples aren’t sent into the lab submersed in water as they were found, as it simply isn’t practical. Instead the wood sample is tagged, and while still dripping wet its sealed in a Zip-Lock baggie. Now ideally, the air is removed from the bag, but its nearly impossible to get it all out, and sometimes the air removal step is skipped entirely. So, take organic material, and stick it in a moist environment in the presence of oxygen, and what do you get? Mold! Mildew! Fungi! Louis Pasteur would be horrified. Not to mention all the weird little insects from the water and the wood which just keep on merrily reproducing! I have seen wet wood under a microscope that looked like the surface of some alien planet, covered in a dense forest of bizzare trees and giant toadstools. It even has its own unique lifeforms, as bright orange and silver and even translucent insects scurry through the spongy remains of the wood.

Yuck.

But really, its the smell that gets to you. Because the wood from Yenikapi is oak that was submerged in the filthy stinking harbour of Istanbul back when it was still Constantinople. Some of it came from the hulls of sunken ships and some from the pilings of the Byzantine piers, but eventually this part of the harbour was filled in, most likely with garbage and household refuse and lord knows what else (the same way Manhattan was expanded in the 18th and 19th centuries), and after sitting down there, muddy and foul for over a thousand years, the whole area gets ripped up during the construction of a new subway system, and the archaeologists swarm in to do their thing.

And several hundred pieces of wood with the consistency of an overcooked souffle and a scent that falls somewhere between a high school linebacker’s jock strap and a rodent that’s been dead for a week, with notes of decaying seaweed, sewage, and the acrid tang of seawater, end up half a world away in the Cornell dendro lab.

The archaeological work on the site has steadily increased since the site’s discovery in 2004, as the Turkish government really wants to move forward with construction, and as a result more and more Yenikapi samples have flooded the lab each year. There was so much of it this year, that I heard its all the students or the lab techs get to work on. For once, I am thankful for my thesis.

Links:
CNN article about the construction at Yenikapi
Cornell Tree-Ring Laboratory
excellent Saudia Aramco World article about the archaeology

Okay, the photo location contest is over.  And yes,  the location is… Ithaca, N.Y., more specifically Upper Treman Park – and my sentimental favorite of the area’s several beautiful state parks showcasing deep gorges and mesmerizing waterfalls.  From Upper (Robert H.) Treman, you can take a spectacular hike along the gorge (known as Enfield Glen) past 12 waterfalls (including 115-foot Lucifer Falls) down to Lower Treman where the gorge disgorges (hmm, never connected the word “gorge” and “disgorge” before) into a wide stream-fed pool that’s perfect for swimming, albeit very cold, with diving boards (popular with daredevils, young and not-so-young) and a waterfall rock face you can try to claw your way across while getting bombarded by gushing water.

The hike is easy and lovely – a wooded narrow passageway with cut stone steps that winds along the gorge, with bridges crossing over the rushing water.  One time, we found a lone bagpiper playing at the bottom of one waterfall – an image and sound I’ll never forget. Last summer when we took our 7th  every-other-year  Ithaca family vacation  (or was it our 8th? My friend Myra can set me straight -  we’ve shared a cottage on Cayuga Lake with her family during all these wonderful upstate New York get-aways from the real world), the gorge was full of water – making it particularly dramatic but unfortunately upping the bacteria count, or some such, which ruled out swimming.  Another favorite is Buttermilk State Park, just down the road from Treman – it too has a gorge that bottoms out into an icy cool pool for swimming.

My other favorite gorges run right through the Cornell campus – including Cascadilla Gorge, which was technically closed last summer because of damage caused to the path by the intense water but we hiked it, carefully, anyway.  And the hidden area known locally as flatrock in the sweet little enclave of Forest Home on Fall Creek near the Cornell Plantations is a quiet beauty – not high-dropping falls but water rushing past and atop flat rocks you can wander around. With its elegant Greek Revival houses, two one-lane steel-truss bridges built in the early 1900’s, and remnants of old stone mills, Forest Home is where I dream of living in Ithaca.

Taughannock Falls State Park is the highest of the area’s falls (at 215 feet, it’s reportedly 33 feet taller than Niagara and  the northeast U.S.’ s highest  free-falling waterfall, whatever that means) but the hike to it has  never grabbed me quite as much as the other parks’ hikes – it’s flatter,more open, without the stairs of the other gorge hikes, less rugged, winding, and mysterious.

Any wonder why I drive around Iowa with a bumper sticker that reads “Ithaca is gorges”?

From http://news.library.cornell.edu/com/news/PressReleases/vivo.cfm

NIH Funds VIVO Project to Discover Expertise and Enable Collaborations

ITHACA, N.Y. (Oct. 20, 2009) – Cornell University Library is pleased to announce a $12.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to establish and support the national networking of biomedical researchers. The two-year grant is led by the University of Florida, with Cornell University and Indiana University as major partners.

VIVO, the technology supporting the network, builds a fundamental new capability to connect researchers and scholars and facilitate collaboration. Through this comprehensive network, scientists will be able to identify existing and ongoing work, explore interdisciplinary opportunities and initiate new partnerships.

‘Tis the season to be broke.  The recession seems to have hit everyone hard and it may seem disheartening not being able to give your loved ones everything you want. Tip for shopping this year: Try to go more personal, creative, and thoughtful, rather than expensive, extravagant, and showy!

Anyway, it may seem hard to give to those in need this year.  The Ithaca Journal reported last month that philanthropic giving has slightly declined, while the need is increasing significantly.   Yet, this is a time the less fortunate need help the most.  Remember, you and your friends and family are not in this world alone.  We need to help our community, our world.  We are all in this together.

Here are some ways you can help out around Tompkins County:

• It’s A Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play. Cornell’s Schwartz Center for the Perfoming Arts will present this live radio play this Sat. Dec. 12 at 7:30 p.m.  Trumansburg Community Chorus & Newfield High School Chorus will be caroling before the show. A portion of proceeds will go to United Way of Tompkins County.  Tickets $8 students/seniors, $10 general. 607-254-ARTS or schwartztickets.com
• Free Basketball Clinic. Cornell University’s Women’s and Men’s Basketball teams are hosting a basketball clinic (10 – 11 a.m.) and a free throw session (11 – 12 a.m.) at Cornell’s Newman Arena this Sat. Dec. 12.  United Way of Tompkins County  will be collecting donations for each free throw made. Contact Woody Kampmann 607-255-0491.
• Homeless Shelter Wish List. Visit the site to see all the items homeless shelters need.  Drop off the donations at the Chapter House, 201 W. Clinton St., Downtown Ithaca 9 – 5, Monday – Friday until Dec. 23.